daniel prazer

It’s been done before. Joe Meno did it with the gorgeous cloth-backed short story collection Demons in the Spring, which had each story illustrated by a different artist. I remember, a few years ago, when I worked at Borders, having a signed copy of David LaChapelle’s superfolio Artists and Prostitutes, and I thought they were nuts for leaving a copy of a $4,000 book out for people to touch. The damn thing weighed over 40 pounds, and there were just two of them, counting the fingerprinted copy, in the largest store in the country.

But the thing is, both of these books are stunningly beautiful, an object to behold, if only for the sake of holding it.

Now there’s this one, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which, at $625 ($421–it’s on sale at Amazon!) is a six-volume desk set. I can’t help but feel that for foodies and chefs alike, it is as the LaChappelle book is to photographers.

But I’m heartened, in this age of iPads and Kindles and all of their various clones, that people like Meno and publishers are willing to go out on a limb and make beautiful books for the sake of making books. Nothing feels like something that you can hold in your hand and savor (pardon the food pun)—the smell of the paper and ink, the weight of it in your hand, the beauty of it sitting on your shelf.