List of Josefina's Books (Part 1)

The first thing people want to know when talking about Josefina is “Where can I get her cookbooks?” Unfortunately, Josefina’s books went out of print in the late 1960s, and although some Mexican publishers reprinted some titles in the 1970s and 80s, even those are no longer available. I recently have a great conversation with Beverly Joy-Karno during the Guadalajara Book Fair (FIL). Beverly is the owner (with her husband Howard) of the best resource to find Josefina’s books in the United States: Howard Karno Books, a bookstore in California that specializes in new, out-of-print, and rare books from and about Latino America. As it happens, Beverly is also a huge Josefina follower and extremely knowledgeable about the more than 140 books that she published. So if you are looking for a specific Josefina title, Karno Books should be your first stop, either online or in person. After that the choices are to borrow a copy from a library, or dig deep into the dark corners of old Mexican bookstores. I know most large American libraries, such as NYPL in New York and LAPL in Los Angeles have some copies available for researches and Beverly tells me that the University of San Diego and the University of New Mexico have purchased large collections of Josefina’s books from her.

My meeting with Beverly was also a very helpful step towards building a comprehensive list of all the titles that Josefina published in an astonishing career that yielded hundreds of cookbooks and a cooking magazine. Beverly was too generous by sending me a list of all the titles the bookstore had carried with information about dates, page counts, edition, and comments. Combining this list with two other (much smaller) lists I have I will be posting here a chronological list of all titles published by Josefina.

If you have a copy (or copies) of any of these books, please email us or write a comment in this blog. We would love to hear from you.


Today we start with the two first book published by Josefina in the late 1930s.


Title: “Manual practico de cocina”
By: Velázquez de León de González, Josefina.
Date Published: 1936
Country: Mexico
Publisher: Academia Calrod,
Pages: 334p.
Binding: library binding.

Title: “Reposteria Selecta. El arte de hacer pasteles”
By: Velázquez de León de González, Josefina.
Volumes: 3
Date Published: 1938
Country: Mexico
Publisher: Academia Calrod,
Pages: 97.
Binding: 20cm


Notes: This are two of the few books where Josefina uses her marriage name “Velázquez de León de González, but by the time these books were published she was already a widow. The publisher of these books is the Academia Calrod, the original name of Josefina’s cooking school. Calrod heating elements are responsible for the first electric stoves and ranges and where strongly marketed by GE, a sponsor in Josefina’s books. For more information about this topic go here