Best sellers; old stories
The Amber Unicorn’s collection of about 16,000 cookbooks covers just about every form of cooking, eating and entertaining imaginable.
“I mean, there aren’t too many sections I don’t have,” says Myrna Donato, who owns the store with her husband, Lou.
Vegan cookbooks are big, Donato says, and so are wild game cookbooks. Jewish cookbooks are “always good,” and soul food cookbooks — Patti Labelle’s series, for example — are consistently good sellers.
“Japanese cookbooks sell really well
... French (ones) come and goes. German cookbooks, hardly ever. Russian cookbooks would sell if I could get any.”
One of the stranger cookbooks Donato has come across was one devoted to slug cuisine. “Well, basically, they’re the same as snails without the shell,” she figures.
There’s an interesting story behind a cookbook by actor/gourmet Vincent Price. Years ago, browsers who knew Price suggested that Donato offer it to him, because he didn’t have his own copy.
“I wrote him later and told him how much I enjoyed his movies and said, ‘I need to tell you, I’ve got your book on sale and I’ll sell you the book for what I have in it,’ which, at that time, was $30. He sent me a postcard back, saying, ‘Thank you for the offer, but I’d never pay that much for that book.’ “
Sometimes, a cookbook offers an oddity unrelated to the recipes it contains. “Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Cook Book,” for example, which features illustrations by Andy — here, “Andrew” — Warhol “before he became Andy Warhol,” Donato says.
And if the store were to catch fire and she could rescue only one cookbook? Donato laughs.
“That’d be hard,” she says, because “I’ve got a couple of $600 ones up there.”
But her favorite cookbook? “You know, I still am partial to my Betty Crocker,” she says. “That’s what I learned to cook from when I was a kid.”