With their exotic evocations, visual styling, and sensual photography, one would expect cookbooks to sell themselves.
Many people come in for specific things.
Adrian Newell of Warwick's in La Jolla, California, echoed that sentiment. People want to know specifics about recipes. With fiction, you can sell on reputation. A perusal of lists shows just how finely honed the categories and subcategories are. Some groupings, like Italian cookbooks, have splintered into even smaller subdivisions to include regular or low-fat variations on pasta, vegetables, soups, and so on, from which one can further choose according to Northern, Southern, Tuscan, and coastal influence, not to mention the cuisines of Sicily and Sardinia.