Just some random stories keyed to the release of “Julie & Julia,” the Nora Ephron movie that stars Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as the blogger who chronicles her own effort to cook all of the recipes in “Mastering The Art of French Cooking,” flashing back and forth between 1940s Paris and 2002 New York City.
• In New York, the Daily News reports that the movie and surrounding publicity “has boosted sales of Child's tome to new heights.” The book is now in its 49th printing, and it “rose to the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com's Top 100 best-sellers list over the weekend. It captured the top spot on the Barnes & Noble online best-seller list on Tuesday. Sales jumped 300% in a mere week and were so brisk that publisher Random House has ordered three new printings of the cookbook to keep up with demand.”
Also racking up new and big sales – Child’s memoir, “My Life in France.”
• USA Today reports that “PBS has up to 1,000 hours of Child video on its website, and its top 10 video streams are all Child.”
In addition, the paper writes, “A $35 Child menu special, introduced Tuesday by the Culinary Institute of America at its Escoffier Restaurant in Hyde Park, N.Y., drew nearly 400 reservations, vs. a typical 150 in August.”
• And the Washington Post reports that at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, visitors have been lining up to visit Child’s reassembled kitchen from her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, which is seen briefly in the movie.
"To our visitors, the kitchen appears both accessible and extraordinary at the same time," says co-curator Paula Johnson. "Accessible in that it seems so ordinary, unpretentious and 'just like mine,' and extraordinary in that it contains the actual tools and equipment collected, used and cared for by the beloved Julia Child."
• In New York, the Daily News reports that the movie and surrounding publicity “has boosted sales of Child's tome to new heights.” The book is now in its 49th printing, and it “rose to the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com's Top 100 best-sellers list over the weekend. It captured the top spot on the Barnes & Noble online best-seller list on Tuesday. Sales jumped 300% in a mere week and were so brisk that publisher Random House has ordered three new printings of the cookbook to keep up with demand.”
Also racking up new and big sales – Child’s memoir, “My Life in France.”
• USA Today reports that “PBS has up to 1,000 hours of Child video on its website, and its top 10 video streams are all Child.”
In addition, the paper writes, “A $35 Child menu special, introduced Tuesday by the Culinary Institute of America at its Escoffier Restaurant in Hyde Park, N.Y., drew nearly 400 reservations, vs. a typical 150 in August.”
• And the Washington Post reports that at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, visitors have been lining up to visit Child’s reassembled kitchen from her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, which is seen briefly in the movie.
"To our visitors, the kitchen appears both accessible and extraordinary at the same time," says co-curator Paula Johnson. "Accessible in that it seems so ordinary, unpretentious and 'just like mine,' and extraordinary in that it contains the actual tools and equipment collected, used and cared for by the beloved Julia Child."
- KC's View:
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Considering that accessibility and popularity, the question is this:
Do you have a Julia Child promotion in your store? If not, why not?
