At 53, Debbie Berne had designed hundreds of books and covers for everyone from Thich Nhat Hanh to Berkeley Bowl. She’d even written a book about how to design books, but the book she was planning next was a dream project: a visual and historical tribute to her favorite medium, cookbooks.
Rich with photos and meticulous in its research, Cookbooking: A Fan’s Guide was to examine cookbooks as aesthetic objects and anthropological vessels. Berne sought out titles from the famous to the rare, the practical to the beautiful, lavishing her attention on books such as 1931’s Joy of Cooking, now considered a bible, to World War II notebooks, “short stapled xeroxes,” and hippie pamphlets with line-drawn images.
In September 2025, Berne submitted her final draft of Cookbooking: A Fan’s Guide to her publisher, Berkeley’s independent Hardie Grant. The book would run at over 200 pages long with an index and bibliography.
Berne would not live to see Cookbooking published. She died a few days short of her 56th birthday on December 24, after a nearly two-year battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Now, in Berne’s absence, her husband David Murray, her publishing team, and an army of her loved ones are tasked with bringing Cookbooking to the world.
The first of several events is a release party for Cookbooking on September 1 at Omnivore Books. Guests are encouraged to bring their most used, stained, wacky, arcane, and heirloom cookbooks to share. The plan is to replicate that at bookstores across the country.
Born in West Orange, New Jersey and raised in West Bloomfield, Michigan, Berne was consumed by books. Throughout her life, whenever she finished reading one, she’d write the title, the author, and the date in lined composition books to keep track. She always knew she’d want to work on books, and after studying art history at the University of Michigan, she landed a job at a publisher as an editorial assistant, eventually teaching herself graphic design.
Murray, who works as a motion graphics designer, met Berne at the University of Michigan. They got together sometime in the ‘90s after both moving to San Francisco, marrying in 2004. On their first wedding anniversary they welcomed their child, Helvetica, now 21, and decided to move to the East Bay, as Murray said, “like everybody else.”
The couple purchased a triplex in Oakland’s Bushrod neighborhood with another couple, fellow musicians whom they performed with. Murray plays the fiddle and the banjo; Berne played the banjo as well. With housemate Allegra Yellin on guitar and friend Rachel Kraai on the washtub bass, they performed as the Squirrelly Stringband for about 20 years at gigs and square dances around town. Each family had separate living quarters but shared one large kitchen, living semi-communally and raising their children together for over a decade.
Mealtime was a central pillar of their lives. “There was a lot of cooking going on and a lot of talk about cooking and we had a lot of cookbooks,” Murray recalled. He, along with Yellin, were the de facto chefs for the blended family and the friends they’d host at large dinner gatherings. As Berne put in Cookbooking, “whoever was there would pull up a chair and dig in.”
Among the recipes they all enjoyed during that period: Whitney Street Yum Cakes, the household’s go-to pancake recipe discovered after years of R&D. “That was always a fun morning, when the yum cakes came out,” Murray said.
“One person would be making breakfast for the kids, another parent would be making the lunches for school and someone else would be sitting at the table reading a kids’ book to everybody to keep them entertained,” he continued. “We were just this big happy family that all cooked and ate together.”
Berne was not a chef, but she was fascinated by the creation and sharing of recipes. As she wrote in the introduction to Cookbooking, “There’s really never a cookbook I open and don’t find something interesting within.”
During the course of her career, Berne designed books on all subjects, though she’s probably best known for her work on a series of “How To” titles from Thiền Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, published by the Berkeley-based non-profit Parallax Press.
Her passion, though, was cookbooks. She designed the covers and interiors for titles including The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook (2018), The Official Downton Abbey Cookbook (2019), Anna Voloshyna’s BUDMO! (2022), and Chay Wike’s The Kitchen Commune (2024).
She’d tell people that designing them felt like working out a puzzle, trying to incorporate creative and personal elements within a standardized framework. “She loved the challenge of trying to make a large book that has all these parts and get them to fit into a logical format,” Murray said. “Every cookbook has its own style and yet, they have to adhere to these certain rigid formatting rules.”
After decades of beautifying other people’s books, she felt that it was time to make her own. Her first book, The Design of Books: An Explainer for Authors, Editors, Agents, and Other Curious Readers was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. (Ever the bibliophile, Berne was excited to be published by the same press that put out The Chicago Manual Style.)
Even as she was still putting the finishing touches on The Design of Books, she was thinking of her next project.
She began shopping her proposal for Cookbooking to publishers toward the end of 2023. During that time, she was experiencing what she described as brain fog that she first attributed to menopause. She got Covid in early 2024 and as her brain fog worsened — remembering certain words, especially pronouns, had become difficult for her — Berne and Murray wondered if long Covid was the culprit.
Berne plowed ahead with the project and eventually accepted a deal for Cookbooking with Hardie Grant in January 2024. The next week, an MRI revealed that she had a brain tumor.
The Design of Books was to come out the following month and Berne had a launch party planned at Green Apple Books on the Park. Instead of picking out what to wear and choosing a pen to sign books, she was forced to postpone the launch and undergo an operation the following week.
Doctors successfully removed the tumor, though Berne’s path to recovery and her ability to finish Cookbooking was unclear. Publisher Jenny Wapner encouraged her to take a pause but Berne was eager to get back to the project. On March 14, 2024, a mere six weeks after her brain surgery, Berne was standing in front of a packed house at Green Apple on 9th Avenue for the delayed launch party for The Design of Books.
She dove into Cookbooking shortly thereafter. What followed was a burst of productivity. In 18 months, she wrote the text, photographed dozens of vintage cookbooks, and designed Cookbooking.
She wrote at home most mornings and would head to one of several different libraries, including the Fong Yun Wah Rare Book Room at UC Berkeley or at Omnivore Books in San Francisco to research cookbooks. She’d be on the phone with cookbook stores across the country to discuss what rare, arcane, and precious titles they had hiding in plain sight and routinely scoured eBay. The chemotherapy sometimes brought on waves of fatigue that required rest, but Berne always got up and back at it.
Berne never let her illness stop her, nor did she keep it a secret. During her treatment, she often wore a device called an Optune, essentially a large bandage that looks like a bathing cap with electrodes delivering electrical waves into the patient’s skull to slow the growth of the tumor. It was powered by a big battery pack.
“She’d be going to the library wearing this thing on her head and carrying this two-pound backpack with her and she'd come back with like, another 10 pounds of cookbooks in the backpack. And I was like, How are you even carrying that?” said Murray. “She somehow had the strength to do it.”
Berne documented her research and findings regularly on her Instagram and left exciting new finds on her publisher Wapner’s doorstep. As she finished pages, she would print them out and walk directly into the Hardie Grant office for feedback.
There were times she doubted herself, asking “Are my words still working? Is my brain?” With a steady stream of pages coming in, her publishers would tell she was doing fine and to carry on.
According to Murray, Cookbooking gave Berne purpose and helped her through her hardest days. “She was never depressed,” he said. “She would just get up and say ‘I’m so excited to work on my book today.’”
Berne was highly organized, and with her knowledge of book publishing, she foresaw and planned for every possible scenario. While she had backup designers ready to take over the project should she become too weak, she was able to see it through and deliver a finished manuscript.
A week later, she learned her tumor had returned. She was given a few months to live.
Reading Cookbooking, there is not a whisper of her illness. Berne didn’t think being sick had anything to do with what she wanted to write about, Murray recalled. And yet, Berne’s death is now an inextricable part of the book’s story, especially as her publisher and her family bring it out into the world.
“I was telling a guy that I met the other day who had just gotten over some form of cancer and when I told him her story, he was basically crying and was so inspired and moved by it,” Murray said. “He was like, that's what I need to do in my life to make it through this period of illness: to find some kind of passion like that.”
After Berne’s passing, publicist Louise Newlands and Wapner at Hardie Grant sat down with Murray to discuss what promoting Cookbooking could look like. They, along with a long list of Berne’s friends and former colleagues, are collaborating on community events and social media campaigns to reach as many readers as possible.
The rollout, understandably, is bittersweet. It’s heartbreaking to celebrate a person’s passion project when that person is no longer around to celebrate with you. But Berne is present in a way: her good humor, her cordiality, and above all else, her voice comes through on every page of Cookbooking.
“It’s been difficult,” Wapner said. “I think every author imagines what it will be like when they’re at the bookstore doing an event and to think that she’s not going to be there for that…”
At that, she trails off, barely needing to finish her thought.
“The book feels incredibly supported,” she said.
In the introduction to Cookbooking, Berne explains the appeal these books hold to chefs, readers, and anyone who ever discovered a recipe for Yum Cakes that changed their life. “On the surface, they tell us what to do in the kitchen. Beneath that, they suggest how we could live.”
A version of this story first ran in print in Gazetteer San Francisco Issue 4.
