This is a book I forgot I had done. Which is a shame. I had fun doing it. I don’t love cookies and it ran contrary to everything I wanted to achieve as an illustrator and I had no hand in its writing. I simply liked the people who put it together. “The Cookie Lovers Cookie Book” was published by Harper and Row in 1986 and was written by Richard Sax and edited by Rick Kot both of whom became friends. It was early in all our careers (I didn’t even warrant a credit as it’s illustrator) but i look back on the that time with great affection. I met with Richard and Rick at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. The Algonquin had significant purchase in my publishing imagination. Many of my heroes had made the lobby their unofficial club house in the 1920s. Scott Fitzgerald, J S Perelman, the Marx brothers, Herman Mankiewicz (who wrote Citizen Kane), George S Kauffman, Norman Belle Geddes. Dorothy Parker said “pearls before swine” there. Harold Ross supposedly invented The New Yorker magazine at the bar while scribbling on a napkin. By 1986 it’s charms were ragged but still much in evidence. The lobby looked like an extra large living room of someone’s once affluent Aunt. It was an inviting hodgepodge of couches,lamps and chairs clustered together like little fiefdoms that encouraged group drinking and long conversations. It was such a very New York place. Richard Sax was affable and funny. Rick Kot dry witted, mumbly and with a streak of snarky fun. And so we sat and talked and coctailed and by the third drink I decided to illustrate a cookbook. It was a lark. But I learned a great deal from Richard about cooking and chefs and a certain world view. That good cooking can be based in a kind of simple honesty. His cookbooks are still revered. Rick Kot edited so many of my favorite people Roz Chast, Linda Barry, Glen Baxter. He was one of the first to suspect that my movie madness might lead to something. Apparently it can be a good idea to do something with no other goal than to enjoy the time spent with like minds and potent spirits #cookiesofinstagram #illustrationartist #justdoit #glenbaxter https://www.instagram.com/p/B0Ys4XzFxyc/?igshid=jcptn7bsw31m
