Bestselling Out-of-Print Cookbooks

Thousands of cookbooks are published each year - diet cookbooks, dessert cookbooks, slow-cooker cookbooks, tofu cookbooks, curry cookbooks, potato cookbooks, garlic cookbooks, gluten-free cookbooks and many, many more.  Many have small print runs, others are self-published by church groups or community organizations, while others are penned by celebrity chefs promoting their talents on primetime television or sourced from the menus of famous restaurants.

Even with so many varieties, the vast majority fall out-of-print within a few years of being published. Putting aside culinary juggernauts such as The Joy of Cooking and The Moosewood Cookbook, cookbooks have a very short shelf life in mainstream bookstores. However, the Internet and the world’s second-hand booksellers have ensured these out-of-print cookery books can be found and purchased in seconds.

The sad fact is that most of these out-of-print and forgotten cookbooks are actually very good. Real foodies know the best cookbooks are not necessarily the most recently published ones. We have dived into our database of sales records and compiled the top 10 bestselling out-of-print cookbooks – the authors range from the master of horror to an American comedy actor famous for his memorable appearances in The Cannonball Run and the final credit sequence in Blazing Saddles.

AbeBooks’ Top 10 Bestselling Out-of-Print Cookbooks

Get cooking with our other features for foodies:

• Hand-Me-Down Cookbooks
• Weird Cookbooks
• Pumpkin Cookbooks
• Most Expensive Cookbooks