Edible Book Festival

What the day is

The Edible Book Festival is held on April 1. Participants make something that refers to a book, entirely out of food, and the work is displayed, documented and then eaten by everyone present.

Origin and background

The festival began in 2000, started by a pair of artists working in book arts, and it spread quickly through libraries, universities and art schools. Events are organized locally and independently, which is why no two look alike.

The date carries two jokes at once. April 1 is the birthday of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French magistrate who wrote a celebrated book on the philosophy of eating in 1825, so the day nods to the writer who treated food as a subject worth serious thought. It is also April Fools' Day, which suits a form built on puns.

The entries are mostly wordplay. Titles get taken literally, or bent into something edible by a single letter, and the pleasure is in the groan. Some are elaborate sculptures; plenty are a cake with a well-chosen title, and the rules are loose enough that both belong.

What gives the festival its point is that the work is destroyed on purpose. An edible book cannot be collected, sold or kept, so the only thing that survives is the photograph and the memory of eating it, which puts it alongside other deliberately temporary art forms. It also inverts the usual relationship with books, which are objects specifically designed to outlast the people who make them.

For libraries it doubles as outreach, since a competition that ends in cake draws people who would not attend a lecture.

How to take part

• Check whether a local library, college or art school is holding an event.
• Start from the pun rather than the recipe. The title is most of the work.
• Photograph it properly before anyone eats it, since that is all that will remain.
• Keep it genuinely edible, which is the constraint that makes it interesting.
• Hold your own at home with a few friends and one shared bookshelf.