In Print. In Sweden.

ät mig, 2011

I finally got it.

You may recall that last year a photograph of mine was sold to a Swedish publisher for use on a book cover. It was my understanding that the book was going to be a French cookbook, albeit published in Swedish. Part of the deal of the sale was that I was to get a copy of the book.

The publisher promptly paid for the use of the photograph. Six month after the publication date, though, I hadn’t received a copy of the book.

It finally came last week. The publisher apologized for the delay, noting that the first edition of the book sold out quickly. I don’t know if that means the first edition was a run of thirty, three thousand or thirty thousand. It really doesn’t matter. I’m intrigued enough that there are now households and apartments in Sweden that have a picture of mine on their bookshelf. Besides, I don’t have any trips to Sweden planned. So I’m not holding my breath waiting to be hoisted onto the shoulders of admiring Scandinavians’ shoulders at such time as I may ever step off a plane, ship or toboggan in Stockholm.

That’s the book’s cover, above. The inside, though, doesn’t include a single recipe. And the mention of the word roman on the cover suggests that the book’s a novel instead of a cookbook.

The title of the book is ät mig, which my handy online Swedish-to-English translator interprets as “At me.” I’m guessing there’s an idiom involved; perhaps something on the order of “a place of my own.” This hypothesis is reinforced by a further stab at translation of the back cover, which suggests that rather than being a French cookbook, ät mig is about a woman who opens a French restaurant in order to find herself. Eat. Pray. Love. Swedish-style.

A little more research suggests that ät mig is the Swedish translation of French author Agnes Desarthe's Chez Moi. The French edition has someone else's picture on the cover.

Anyway, ät mig is my first foreign book cover. It doesn’t look tawdry enough to be banned in Boston, though, so the chances of it getting much attention here in the U.S. are probably pretty slim.