Short Stack

I’ve been frustrated with Kickstarter lately. I blame Zach Braff! There’s a great article, here, explaining how celebrities are ruining the crowd-sourced funding site. That said there are so many projects that you stumble upon, like this one by Nick Fauchald. Short Stack, Fauchald’s food publication, combines two of my great loves, cooking and reading, with his gorgeous series of one-ingredient subjects. The Short Stack campaign runs through the end of this week and he’s already surpassed his 50K ask. I got a chance to interview Fauchald, where we talk goals, the joys of holding a physical book (dog eared pages!) and food writing talent.

danapop: How did the idea for Short Stack Editions come about and what would reaching the Kickstarter goal of $50K do for your vision?

Nick Fauchald: Short Stack was a way for me to work on a purely print-based project. I’d had my hands in so many digital things in recent years that I missed working with something you could hold in your hands.

We were lucky enough to reach our Kickstarter goal within the first week of our campaign. Any extra money we raise beyond this goal will go towards printing more copies of each edition, which in turn will pay our authors more for their hard work.

danapop: How did you choose the three singular ingredients you did of strawberry, egg and tomato? Was the publication purposefully timed (the tomatoes and strawberries) to correspond with peak season?

Fauchald: We want each Short Stack edition to be used throughout the year, but we’re also sensitive to seasonal ingredients. Some editions will be more seasonal than others; for example, you can get great eggs all year long, while the season for the best tomatoes and strawberries is more finite, so we’ll be sure to publish these editions near peak harvest times.

danapop: As much as I love my iPad and Kindle, I still love to hold newspapers and books in my hands. I like the weight, the smell and the overall feel of them. Your editions are darling in size, seemingly so simple, but so thoughtful – what do you want the person that buys and reads them to get out of it?

Fauchald: There’s something about flipping through a cookbook that you can replicate on a computer. The Internet is great for searching for a recipe, but I don’t trust just anything I find via Google; I want to know who created the recipe and if they took the time to make sure it will work in my kitchen. I hope our readers will keep their Short Stack editions handy for whenever they need a new idea for cooking a favorite ingredient. And, like all good cookbooks, we hope our readers will collect Short Stacks and pass them along to their friends and family.

danapop: Tell me more about Susan Spungen, Ian Knauer and Soa Davies. How did you connect with such stellar talent? What about the suppliers of the paper, the printer, — how did you determine all of these factors to create such high-quality literary gems?

Fauchald: We start each edition by finding the best author possible. I’m not interested in having a big-name author, writer or chef take on an edition unless they can deliver fresh, dependable recipes. Susan, Ian and Soa are all known for creating this level of content. Then we ask each author to pick their favorite ingredient, something that excites and inspires them to cook, and that becomes the theme for their edition.

Next, we met with a bunch of printers in New York; we want to produce these booklets as close to home as possible, and using the best materials we can buy. We could have printed these overseas and on cheaper paper, but I think the finished product wouldn’t have felt as special. I hope our readers will notice and appreciate the difference, even if it means charging a few extra bucks for each copy.

danapop: As far as lofty goals, what’s next for Short Stack and where do you want this to go?

Fauchald: After we produce and distribute our first three editions, we have a bullpen of authors ready to work on future Short Stacks. We’ll start producing the next editions right away—you’ll be able to buy them on our own website (ShortStackEditions.com) and through select retailers later this summer.