Another year, guests wandered through the chic White Rabbit gallery in Chippendale admiring avant-garde Chinese art before sitting down to an elegant meal. Invited guests left with weighty gift bags loaded with some of the year's most beautiful cookbooks.

There were celebrity chefs — Guillaume Brahimi and Matt Moran, MasterChef's George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan, Manu Feildel and Kylie Kwong and Thai supremo David Thompson — and style gurus such as Collette Dinnigan and gardener Paul Bangay.

There were walloping publishing successes — Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion remains one of Australia's biggest-selling cookbook ever, with more than 500,000 copies sold since it was first published in 1996. (Back then, Leo Schofield suggested the two-kilogram volume might cause a hernia if anyone lifted it without bending their knees. It was, he added, "the most important culinary work ever published in Australia".)

A few years later, the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet swept into the records book, selling more than 850,000 copies to Australians watching their waistlines.

In a glory era for Australian food and lifestyle publishing, Penguin Books' Lantern imprint, headed by publishing director Julie Gibbs, led the pack. Her intuition and instinct nailed, in book form, the aspirational, style-driven zeitgeist and enthusiasm for kitchen, garden, travel and lifestyle.

But, on Wednesday, the limping, digitally assailed book publishing industry took another blow when Penguin Random House Australia announced Gibbs would be leaving the imprint she founded, at the end of this year, and that Lantern's list would be slashed in 2016 and 2017.

Gibbs did not return the Herald's phone calls but in a statement, Penguin Random House CEO Gabrielle Coyne said prevailing market conditions meant there was no longer "the retail footprint there once was to support the number of illustrated books in our future 2016 and 2017 program".

It has been a bitter year for Lantern, which published Belle Gibson's The Whole Pantry earlier this year before pulling it from bookstores after the controversy over the truth of Gibson's claims about suffering cancer.

The news of Lantern's downsizing was greeted with dismay by cookbook lovers and Lantern authors. "Publisher Julie Gibbs is a creative genius who breathed life into so many authors' work and vision ... this is a very dark day for the publishing fraternity," Sydney chef and Lantern author Christine Manfield wrote on Instagram.

"It's sad," says Tim White, co-owner of Melbourne's legendary Books for Cooks bookshop. "Julie's been a benchmark and innovator for Australian publishing and her product over the years has been considered worldwide to be some of the best food publishing in the world."

Gleebooks' David Gaunt believes Lantern set the bar for cookbooks in Australia and internationally. Of The Cook's Companion, he says: "It was an astonishingly bold success at a time when no one thought you could sell an $80 cookbook — and certainly not an Australian one."

For all that, it's worth asking the question — have we reached peak cookbook? Gibbs herself may well have been asking herself the same question over the years. "The cookbook isn't dead but it is challenged," she said in a 2012 interview with the Herald. "There are too many publishing houses thinking, 'Oh, cookbooks sell, we'll start a list and get on that bandwagon'."

Just how many MasterChef books can one country take? "I think we've reached peak bad cookbooks," says White.

"The genre has become saturated with lots of ephemeral pieces of fluff. People who have a brief glimpse of celebrity produce a cookbook and when you look at it it doesn't have any more substance than what made them a celebrity in the first place. I mean someone will probably do a Gabi Grecko or a Geoffrey Edelsten cookbook."

Still, White sees no downturn in enthusiasm for food books. "People say, 'I've got too many cookbooks, my husband will kill me if I bring another one home'. And then they secretly stick one in their bag."

Gleebooks David Gaunt says he's always thought there were too many cookbooks. "And I emphatically think there are too many cookbooks every Christmas." But he mourns the changes at Lantern. "These are books that have always had a production quality and design excellence that you certainly couldn't say was replicated across the world of cookbooks."

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