Jamie’s Italy Jamie Oliver

Jamie’s Italy Jamie Oliver

Published by Michael Joseph, 2005 (Hardback)

Designed by uncredited

Photographs by David Loftus, additional photographs by Chris Terry and Peter Begg

Jamie’s Italy is Jamie Oliver’s sixth book, it exists not only as a cook book with simple recipes aimed at the home cook but as a travelogue charting the author’s journey through Italy. This book is very visual: the photographs are the dominant feature of the book. This photographs are printed on uncoated paper that gives a rich, tactile presence to the colour saturated images. The text is secondary to the images, line length is slightly too long for comfortable reading, navigation within the book is difficult and some typographic treatments appear to be about the visual appearance of words and not readability: this is a book that is for looking as well as for cooking. In terms of the appearance of the book and of its cover, it could be argued that the elements of the book create a hierarchy where Jamie Oliver, as one of the most well-known chefs in the UK, shares equal billing with Italy and Italian food.

Front cover

The cover shows a photograph, by David Loftus, of the author, styled in pink check shirt, faded jeans and just the right amount of scuzz on his Converse All Stars, sat on a red metal stool, casually eating a small bowl of spaghetti tilted to reveal the contents, with a waiting glass of beer placed on the tail-light of a vintage Fiat, against a wall of artfully peeling and crumbling ochre paint; a box of vegetables with some cherry tomatoes just in view, completing the picture. The photograph with its carefully chosen and arranged signifiers presents an idea of an ‘authentic’, rustic, relaxed and unpretentious Jamie Oliver, read in conjunction with the title ‘Jamie’s Italy’ it also has a secondary signification of an ‘authentic’, rustic, relaxed and unpretentious Italy. This photograph, unlike the others in the book, could well have been taken in a studio, the elements in it are so well constructed with no superfluous elements to distract from the main message of the image which is Jamie Oliver and how his face is used to sell product.

The author’s name is the second dominant element of the cover: it is printed at the top of the page, in uppercase sans-serif, embossed in shiny blue, contrasting against the matt, uncoated paper of the dustjacket. The title of the book appears below in white lowercase Baskerville - a strange conceit on a cover that works so hard to construct an idea of authenticity, to not use title case which usually suggests the definite article.

Inside Pages

The book is 19 cm by 24.5 cm and is printed on off-white matt uncoated paper in full colour. The symmetrical layout is based on a simple one-column grid with a wide margin that is occasionally used to highlight sections of the recipes. Baskerville is used throughout in different weights and colours. Full colour photographs are used throughout the book at full bleed, usually on a single page but occasionally on a double spread. The photographs are more informal than the photograph on the front cover and fall into several categories: portraits of the author cooking or eating; portraits of ‘local characters’, usually busy at work; photographs of the author engaging with local people; photographs of raw ingredients and close-ups of finished meals. All the photographs are shot in the same style; heavilly saturated colours with the emphasis on reds, oranges, ochres and greens with some dark, inky blacks.

The book is divided into sections: each section is announced with a double page spread of a full bleed photograph with text set in lowercase Baskerville reversed out of the photograph. All other pages are based on the same one-column grid that uses 11/13 point justified Baskerville throughout with the list of ingredients presented as a two column list within this column. A larger point size of Baskerville, in colour, is used for headings; demi-bold is used for ingredients and recipe titles which are written in Italian with the English translation underneath in italic. Running footers are also in colour, at the very foot of the page, along with the pagination, which is printed in black.