Welcome to savannahbooks.com. I hope your tour of our site will be enjoyable for you. I want to tell you a little bit about the people behind savannahbooks.com and the two books The Pirates’ House Cookbook and Sojourn in Savannah featured on this site.
Back in the 60’s, when I was growing up in Savannah, I would spend my Saturdays doing errands with my dad, Herb. We drove what I remember as “the old blue Plymouth.” It had holes in the floorboard where we could watch the street go by underneath. In those days, Dad and his business partner owned 4 restaurants, including the Pirates’ House. On Saturday, we would visit one or all of these restaurants. The trunk was full of promotional brochures for Savannah and the Pirates’ House and we would deliver these brochures to motels in and around Savannah. We were a chamber of commerce on wheels!
During this time my mother, Franklin, was busy touring folks around Savannah in the “wagon.” You know the one: long and wide, with a rear-facing seat and window that went into the tailgate. What started out as three women giving tours in their cars turned into a successful tour company with a small fleet of Mercedes vans.
In the meantime, visitors were clamoring for some sort of guidebook, and since there wasn’t one, my mom and her two friends wrote it. Our dining room table was taken over for what seemed like years, until the final proofs were bundled up and taken to the printer in 1968 when Sojourn in Savannah was born. Now, over 30 years and 200,000 copies later, it’s still going strong. Sojourn in Savannah was the first comprehensive guide to Savannah, and in my biased opinion, is still the best. It is Savannah’s official guidebook.
In 1987, after over 40 years in the restaurant business, dad sold the Pirates’ House. He kept The Pirates’ House Cookbook, which was first published in 1982. The first hard cover edition of the cookbook has just been released, and sales, like the food coming out of the restaurant kitchen, are still hot, 65,000 copies and counting. Now in his 80’s, Dad still makes his rounds on Saturday, and as far as I can tell only three things have changed since those Saturdays in the 60’s: the trunk is packed with cookbooks instead of brochures, there are grand children in the back seat instead of my brother and me, and there are no holes in the floorboard.
In 1995, my sister-in-law Ulli revised and edited Sojourn in Savannah. Then in 2000, my sister, Kim, revised and edited for the New Millennium Tenth Edition. Kim is certainly our father’s daughter; she hauls these books around town in her van on Saturday.
Though the beautiful squares in downtown Savannah, filled with majestic, moss covered oaks, are a pleasure to drive around, I’ve decided to leave the streets of Savannah for the superhighway of the Internet, in order to share these fine books with a larger audience.
Come on in! Open Sojourn in Savannah to my favorite section, a walking tour down Bull Street. Have a look in The Pirates’ House Cookbook to learn how to make Oysters Savannah, Seafood Gumbo and Frozen Lemon Pie. Sign up for our FREE weekly embalm: Savannah Snapshots will give you an an excerpt from Sojourn in Savannah and a current look at this week in Savannah, including the local weather forecast. Savannah Delights will give you a weekly taste of Old Savannah with a recipe from The Pirates’ House Cookbook.
I welcome your questions and comments. You can e-mail me at rick@savannahbooks.com. Please help me out by sharing this site with friends.
Here’s wishing you an enjoyable visit to our site, perhaps a wonderful trip to Savannah, and many delightful moments in the kitchen.
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