Despite a late-in-the-month publishing date, Ina Garten’s Cooking for Jeffrey trounced the competition in October. Garten’s tenth book—dedicated to her husband, Jeffrey, a fan-favorite on her TV show, Barefoot Contessa—hit shelves on October 25, and went on to sell more than 112,000 copies in its first week on sale, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks roughly 80% of print sales. Garten’s sales were nearly double those of the next bestselling book, the latest Skinnytaste book from Gina Homolka, which sold roughly 60,000 copies since it went on sale October 11. An impressive feat, but Cooking for Jeffrey still didn’t top Garten’s first week sales for Make it Ahead, which moved more than 130,000 copies in the week after it went on sale in October 2014.
Danielle Walker’s Against All Grain Celebrations came in at #4 last month, selling more than 23,000 copies, coming in behind Everydaycook by Alton Brown. The book, Walker’s third title, but first with Ten Speed Press, was described by her new publisher as their lead title of the fall season, and had a 200,000 copy first print run.
Appetites, the first cookbook from Anthony Bourdain in a decade, landed at #5 with 22,000 copies sold. Bourdain revealed to PW that the book was two years in the making, and that he and his coauthor Laurie Woolever took their time to make an “object that was a thing of wonder, beauty, and strangeness. I wanted to write a cookbook that didn’t look like anybody else’s.”
