Look at the state of this book and I’m only half way through the recipes! It’s falling apart. Publishers please note, cook books need robust bindings!
Zeb Bakes
Bread, the Garden, Walks in Green Places
Look at the state of this book and I’m only half way through the recipes! It’s falling apart. Publishers please note, cook books need robust bindings!
Zeb Bakes 
Very frustrating indeed! Is that the Hamelman book?
Ja wohl!
Very disappointing indeed.
I think Brian has plans to mend it… it doesn’t look like a book that is going to fall apart either.
Boy, that’s just wrong! I pulled mine down and took a look – as you say, it doesn’t look as if it’ll pull apart – and it even seems to be rather flexible, where some feel so stiff that you know if you try and open it flat, you’re asking for trouble. Is your copy published by Wiley – a US edition?
If I were you, I’d contact them for a replacement – but I bet they’d say you sat on it, or something.
One of my favourite books is like that too. Expensive, looks robust and then you look at it cross eyed and it’s disintergrating.
Hamelman = loved to bits, Joanna. (or – did you sit on it?)
Tsk, tsk! shame on them. I agree with drfugawe- you should let them know.
I know what you mean ;-)
How annoying.
My oldest regularly used book from the 80’s hasn’t done that.
Lets blame the English weather – I’m a gentle person, kind to my shoes and my books ;) But I can’t really send this back, I’ve had it a couple of years now, but I also don’t want to have to get another copy to finish the Hamelman project, so I will just have to treat it with TLC and figure out how to glue it back together.
Do you remember that story about the Zen master and his apprentice – the Zen master is always going on about how everything has an alloted time to live and a time to die, like Ecclesiastes, and one day the apprentice breaks the Zen master’s one and only vase while he is cleaning up. When the Zen master asks where the vase is, the apprentice replies “It was time for your vase to die”. We always say that when we drop something on the floor these days. Well, I don’t think my book is quite there yet, life in those pages still…..
That looks like a mighty fine lunch!
I think the state of that book is like a scar from a war wound. I imagine it gives it a bit of cookbook shelf “street” cred amongst other books. “I have been used, and well used” it might say. If you replaced it with a shiny new one, it would not be the same at all.
I remember being rather upset the first time my husband made a mess (stains, food splashes, etc) when he used one of my cookbooks. I also treat my books with loving care. But he was unconcerned and said “It’s a cookbook, it is meant to get that way”. It made me pause and think. Now whenever I see one of those pages it makes me think of the meal he cooked and I am not upset by the less than perfect book. I see it as book ‘character’ or ‘laugh lines’.
What lovely thoughts ! I think you’re right – it’s definitely got cred now – and it’s going to go the distance – it has to :D