The Making of a Best Seller

The Publishing History of La Cuisinière bourgeoise

Abstract

Best selling “how to” books often change in the course of time but how, when and why they change can be difficult to determine. Not only might the author and publisher be jointly responsible for modifying a book’s content but, to complicate matters further, many successful books were “pirated” in the past, violating the equivalent of today’s copyright laws. It was not rare for such pirate editions to modify the original text, in some instances even “improving” on the original. This study of an eighteenth-century cookbook, La Cuisinière bourgeoise – one of the best-selling cookbooks ever published in France – calls attention to the many ruses used by the 
author, the authorised publisher, and their unauthorized competitors to attract new readers, and to the difficulties historians may encounter when using these books as primary source material for their research.