The Ball Blue Book, 38th Edition
A 140-year-old jar deserves a book worth keeping
The brief
The Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving is an object Americans have leaned on since 1909. For the 140th anniversary it needed a new edition, and the temptation with anniversary editions is to make them commemorative, which is another way of saying nobody uses them.
The idea
Do not celebrate the anniversary. Celebrate what Ball jars make possible. Applied to a book, that means the edition has to be more useful than the one before it, not more decorated. An heirloom is an object that earns its way into a second generation by working.
The work
The 38th edition runs to more than two hundred pages and more than five hundred recipes, forty of them new for this printing, all of it updated to current USDA preserving standards. It is designed as the heirloom version of a working reference: paper, layout and typography chosen so the book gets better as it gets older, and so there is room to write in it. It is not a promotional giveaway with a jar on the cover. It is the canning guide, remade.
Where it sits
The Blue Book is one of three pieces built for the anniversary, alongside a long-form brand film about three generations of a family and a lifestyle photography campaign. The film argues that preserving is an act of handing down. The book is the thing that actually gets handed down.
Why it mattered
The resurgence of canning and preserving is not a trend so much as a rejection of the disposable, and a brand with 140 years behind it is entitled to say so. Saying it in a book that outlives the campaign is more convincing than saying it in a campaign.
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