International Edible Books Day

Monday April 8 saw us celebrate International Edible Books Day, a little later than the usual April 1st. This event has been held since 2000 when it was initiated by Judith Hoffman and Beatrice Coron and is now celebrated around the world. The official website for the event is http://www.books2eat.com/

A redesign of our collection processing area gave us a good excuse to invite our colleagues from around the Library to see the new workspace and contribute to and share a morning tea of edible books with us.

We had a wonderful selection of books to feast upon. The curse and its cure, the first published novel set in Brisbane was reinterpreted in shortbread, Wordsworth’s host of golden daffodils appeared as a book shaped banoffee pie with banana daffodils, and a scroll of sponge roll contained the Library commandments.

Memories of Kingaroy was a book with wafer pages and chocolate covers with peanut rugby balls while The book of dough was a loaf of bread cut into a concertina form and inscribed with international currency signs.

There were tiny cakes iced in the form of books with ‘Eat me’ on the covers, a book of bound slabs of toffee, delicate cucumber sandwiches in book form and books made of crackers and pita breads sewn together with chives.

As well as looking fantastic they tasted great, and there were the sort of sad-looking books that make a librarian cringe by the time the feasting had finished.

To go along with Edible Books Day we had on display artists’ books that are not edible, but relate to food.

They included Art of the cake: Paris patisseries by Rita Erlich & Mary Newsome, an extravagant book about cakes in the form of a huge sweet slice presented in a golden cake box, Eat : Jan-Mar 2001 by Jo Pursey in which she records everything she ate from January to March 2001, Let’s eat by Karen Papacek which has text pages inserted as blades into silver knife handles and Helen Sanderson’s coloured blank paper food books Ham & lettuce sandwich, Sandwich IV, Sandwich stack and Licorice allsorts.