Where are the summer cocktails?

I’m a bit late with this week’s post.  It’s because I’m in the final throes of the summer cookbook roundup, that mad mid-May marathon smackdown from which just ten perfect summer cookbooks will emerge on NPR’s summer recommendation list.  (All the runner-ups will appear in a shortlist on my blog).

I can’t say what the theme is, or give away any of the top 10 titles, or tell you what the worst cookbook was.  But I can share an observation: this year seems to mark the definitive disappearance of one of my favorite summer categories:  the summer cocktail book.  

If I’m not mistaken, the pool’s been drying up for years.  It used to be you could count on every summer ushering in a fleet of cute little drinks books with bright, tropical covers.  Dead center in front would be a sweating glassful of ice, maybe adorned with a flourish of fruit or flags or parasols. Sometimes they came in sets.  Sometimes they were tacky.  But they just made you up and long for a tall, cool highball, the leisure to sip it, and someone to sip it with.

This year there’s a nice book of fruit drinks.  There’s a nice book of beer cocktails.  But the days of the fun-loving August libation, ready for its closeup on the set of “Sex and the City,” seem to be behind us.

It may be that I miss those books precisely because their visions of lazy, companiable evenings seem so far removed from life right now, with the hectic end-of-year school schedule, the vegetable garden getting planted, the deadlines to meet.

Which makes me wonder:  is it really the books that have disappeared? or the leisure to buy and enjoy them? Only the publishers know for sure (and maybe not even them.)