Many of you—certainly many of the boomers reading this post—will remember the ubiquitous Joy of Cooking sitting somewhere around or near the kitchen with one of these jackets or covers. (My mom couldn’t cook, but the book still had a perch of honor.)
You’ve probably also seen these more recent updated versions (with the distinctive dot over the “j” …
But I’ll wager that unless your grandma was an early influencer and bought it in 1931 (or you’ve recently skimmed the Simon and Schuster website promoting a facsimile of this edition), that you have never seen this:
This is the first edition of The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes With a Casual Culinary Chat, self-published by Irma S. Rombauer in an edition of 3,000, which sold out within a year. The jacket, designed in a popular poster style using silhouette cutouts, was created by Irma’s daughter Marion Rombauer Becker, who eventually wrote later editions of The Joy of Cooking.
Rombauer Becker, the director of the art department at John Burroughs School in Clayton, OH, created an atypical cookbook cover by depicting St. Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooking, slaying the dragon of kitchen drudgery. Her model for the art deco typeface was A.M. Cassandre’s Bifur. Pretty progressive graphic design for its subject, at the time.