Oh no, another blog. Another commercial enterprise trying to disguise its advertising as a conversation. Well, we hope not. Being involved with cookery books on a daily basis provides us with an excuse to explore a range of topics, but much of the research and debate that animates our office life never makes it into our published work. In other words, sometimes the back stories are instructive and the process of arriving at a ‘No, we’re not going to do that’ is as stimulating as embracing a project. We talk about a lot of things around the office: sustainable agriculture, the hubris of chefs, why kids are obsessed with the color of food, why booksellers don’t seem to read, photography, type, paper, new technology in and out of the kitchen. It’s a cocktail, with no fixed recipe. Sometimes the mix gets a little too strong and we throw it out and start all over. We hope you will find this space a good place to eavesdrop and that our chatter will stimulate you enough to want to join in. Will we talk about books we’ve published or that we sell? In the spirit of transparency the answer is “Yes, sometimes”. It’s inevitable since they occupy so much of our time and energy, but we hope to do so in a way that will not sound like BUY THIS, but much more like Consider this. From the beginning, Bibliotheca Culinaria was conceived as a place for collecting what we hope is useful information. In our minds it was always a sort of refuge, initially for the under-represented class of professional chefs (my, how things have changed) and later as an alternative to the one-size-fits-all kind of books turned out by the big publishing houses. It’s our intention that this blog should constitute a similar space: a place to collect ideas (even the odd ones) that stimulate, a haven for the curious reader.