This is a very ambitious book and does contain an enormous amount of information. The typography is of uneven quality; the designer neglected to use the ligatures that the typeface requires, and the absence of any paragraph indents renders sequential paragraphs confusing to read. The type is frequently overwhelmed by the illustrations, partly because the type is often printed on coloured backgrounds in a small size, while the illustrations are supercharged in size and intensity.

This is a less ambitious book, but it goes a long way in achieving what it set out to do. The type is well set; ligatures are present, as they need to be; the black and white illustrations are quite superb, considering the paper on which they are printed and the press that must have been used. The technical work - the scanning and photoediting - for this book is the best we have seen, in any of the titles in any category in this competition. One defect in the typesetting is that the justification is poor. What this means is that the designer did not give the software the instructions that it needs to make good type into even paragraphs. The summary pages and tables, however, are very well done and inviting to use.

Here we have a very nice typographic design undermined by the use of grey ink with a small face in a light weight. The result, even on good paper, is that the book is very difficult to read. It is not clear to us what may be the intended relation between the comic book illustrations and the recipes. Much space is devoted to these comics, but the real content of this book is a series of recipes created by illustrious chefs. These comic book elements do come as a kind of relief after a page of essentially unreadable, although handsomely set, type, but it is not at all clear what other contribution they make to the book.