Cook Book Audit 1

I've started my visual audit of cook books. I'm not sure whether I have a watertight methodology: my descriptions of the books are probably too subjective. I'm trying to articulate what message - I think - the design of each book is transmitting. Messages of course, depend on context: I wonder whether I'm projecting my ideas onto the books based on what I know about the authors of the books. I've been looking at Nigel Slater's books - even just looking at the hierarchy of information on the covers, it is possible to spot the shift in Nigel Slater's career as he moves from a newspaper column to becoming a known face on television.

In a wider sense, my aims for this project are to look at the shift that has happened in cook books where, in my opinion, books have become about looking and not about cooking. Books have replaced, to some extent, art books as signifiers of taste - this shift is exemplified by Phaidon's move to publishing cook books as well as art books, starting with The Silver Spoon in 2005. I want to show the development of high production values - normally associated with art books - in cook books as an indicator to the change in value given to cook books. This use of high production values (full colour printing, tactile paper stocks, interesting bindings, marker ribbons, embossed covers etc) is possibly connected to the availability of cheaper printing and is lead by marketing; I am interested in analysing how these details add value to a book and why these details are added to cook books. For example, if cook books are meant to be used in a kitchen and given that kitchens tend to get messy, why are so many recent cook books (Jamie's Italy, Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries etc) printed on uncoated paper rather than the more practical wipe-clean coated papers?

I am re-reading Sean Hall's excellent introduction to semiotics This Means This This Means That (1) as a way of framing my writing about cook books within the audit. I am conscious, however, that from the start, despite my concerns about my methodology being watertight, I want this audit to be accessible and readable: I want my analysis to be more than a list of which cook books use serif typefaces and which use sans-serifs and that increases my design language in both senses: practical and theoretical. My intention in doing an MA is to understand why I make design decisions and to be able to articulate more clearly those decisions; I hope that with a rigourous written analysis of the design of cook books, I will be able to articulate the signs within and the messages that the design is transmitting.

(1) Hall, Sean (2007) This Means This, That Means That: A User's Guide to Semiotics, London, Laurence King