Rye Bread

Remember the difficulty I had with the Nordic Bakery cook book? I happened to be in the neighborhood on Saturday and popped into the cafe. The coffees are nice, the cakes look pristine (I had just had lunch and want hungry) but the book is challenging. Not challenging as in hard, but challenging as in there is nothing extraordinarily tempting about the recipes, probably because I am very aware that they will not live up to my expectations.

Is that harsh? Fair enough, does this look like a loaf of bread? I don't think so.
I followed the Nordic Bakery's recipe for rye bread to the letter. Through the fussy step of fermenting the yeast the night before, using almost a kilo of rye flour and spending almost 5 hours coddling it. The yield is supposed to be three loaves of bread, if I had tampered with the recipe I would have accepted that this thick leathery pancake with a gummy glue filling is my fault, but I resisted temptation. Incidentally why give a recipe for three loaves, why not one? Under what circumstances would you need to bake this in bulk, like maybe if you wanted to open up your own bakery? Is that the lesson of this failure, that I should buy my bread in the future because the I'll never find out the secret of making it?
There is something aggressively hateful about a recipe that fails on such a grand scale. I have a rye bread recipe that works every time, I didn't need to use all my flour up on this.
I just read some reviews of the book and they are all predictably gushing, so maybe I am just an idiot, but even an idiot occasionally manages not to screw up, right? Normally I would get rid of a book I have no further interest in cooking from, but this was a gift I'd specifically asked for so I'll suffer on for a while longer. Until the next disaster.