"Bruce K." in ...
> Just took out the new Gourmet Cookbook from the library.
>
> It looks loke a winner except for one fatal flaw.
>
> The headings for all of the recipies are colored light yellow
> against the white paper..
>
> This makes it impossible to scan recipe titles on a page.
>
> I can barely read the titles.

This now-famous "yellow" problem is supposed to be corrected in a later
printing. (I think I read that on amazon.com.)

Here is something else about the new book (relevant in this newsgroup, which
carried references to the Gourmet Cook Book even just in recent months). I
am wondering why no customer "review" or even professional review that I
have read so far, not to mention the introduction and acknowledgement
sections of the book (in my quick read of them) mentions this point, the
most prominent thing about this book, to people interested in US cookbooks
in general.

It is the NEW, or revised, Gourmet Cook Book. The established Gourmet Cook
Book, edited by Earl MacAusland and published by Rand-McNally in 1950, with
various supplements and revisions, was bought in such numbers that it's been
prominent in US used bookstores for many years. I wouldn't be surprised if
the number of copies of the original book in circulation outnumbers the new
one and stays that way for some time. Albeit written at a different time and
with different priorities, and of course a different population of issues of
Gourmet from which to draw. But neither the title nor the introductory
matter in the new book ("60 years in the making," implying that it
overlapped the production of the original -- or maybe just referring to
issues of Gourmet magazine) -- does any comparison or contrast or even
reference to the original at all, that I have found. (I'd be happy to learn
of any.) In the case of reviews that I've seen so far, the situation is
similar.

This is eerie, and probably seems so to many people who have been accustomed
to referring to the Gourmet Cook Book for years, and now hear people talking
about the same title, meaning a completely different work.

I am not talking here about the content of the new book, only its context.

May we look forward now to new editions of, say, Marcus Gavius Apicius, or
the _Guide Culinaire,_ or the _Joy of Cooking,_ edited by new people, with
no mention of their forebears that made these names?

-- Max