Dan Halpern is one busy publisher. As reported in PW last week, he has signed up a record number of cookbooks for his HarperCollins imprint, adding to an already impressive stable of food writers that includes Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. But the constrains of print prevented us from telling how Halpern helped Ecco’s cookbook list evolve, who he thinks may be leading the new generation of cookbook co-authors, and what his hopes are for the future. Read on...
What got Ecco started in cookbooks: “[In 1985,] we did a reprint of Paula Wolfert’s Mediterranean Cooking in hardcover. We did a couple of Madhur Jaffrey books; the first one was Invitation to Indian Cooking [in 1999], which is still a great book. She received a James Beard Hall of Fame Award for that title. We did a bunch of books like that, books that had been out of print.”
And then, in 1999, HarperCollins bought Ecco. “When we came here I wanted to establish a cookbook list for Ecco. The first book was David Bouley’s first book, East of Paris. It was a good start for Ecco’s list. We got Melissa Clark to write it. It helped a lot, because it gave credibility to our list.”
After which, Anthony Bourdain introduced you to a few writers. “Tony Bourdain forced two authors on us, one very high and one very low. One was Fergus Henderson, who wrote The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. We got a lot of attention among chefs for that book. We also bought a few titles of Ferran Adria’s, and we published him for the first time over here. We ended up buying all the books he had in English. We were hopeful we could sell 300 or 400 copies but they just flew out of Amazon, and they were non-returnable. Then we just slowly added people onto the list.”
Would you consider Batali and Bourdain Ecco “house authors”? “Obviously, Mario sells incredible numbers and it’s nice. And I like the fact that Tony Bourdain is on the list. But I also edit Danny Meyer. He may be doing a new cookbook.”
You just signed up British chef April Bloomfield’s A Girl and Her Pig, for publication in March 2012, in a deal brokered by Luke Janklow of Janklow & Nesbit. “I’ve been following her since she got here. There were 11 of us at dinner at [her restaurant] The Breslin last night, with [New York Magazine restaurant critic] Adam Platt, and we all had the 25-pound pig. April’s modest and very smart and just an interesting person.”
Who’s co-authoring her book? “A young food writer named JJ Goode. Melissa and Andrew Friedman are the old pros, but we need to find new writers, too. I had read Serious Barbecue [by Adam Perry Lang, which Goode coauthored]. JJ also is working on [Fatty Crab chef] Zak Pelaccio’s book. JJ came in, and I think Zak [pictured] didn’t trust the first writer he was working with, and JJ really got him.”
So what’s your approach to signing up cookbooks now? “We try to move slowly. We had to create a list that people wanted to be on. The idea behind this list is that all these books will still be around 10 or 15 years from now. We want to increase it a little bit, but not too much. If we don’t find books that fit onto the list, we won’t do this [many] again. It’s a new level for Ecco.”
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