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Pruning the overgrown cookbook collection


Alex

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The books I almost always get rid of are books from restaurants or from famous chefs, like those from the food channel or from pretentious restaurants--although I've vowed not to buy that kind again.

Just out of curiosity, not trying to start an argument, what's your personal criteria for that? What determines if a chef is just doing what they want to do or being pretentious? I just wonder how others draw their personal line on things like that. I don't have a line in that area but maybe I should. Is serving 25 appetizer sized courses using expensive ingredients and leading edge techniques being pretentious or is serving meatloaf and mashed potatoes so that I won't be considered pretentious being pretentious? Would some of the "famous" chefs that get a lot of criticism be considered good or great chefs if it weren't for the fact that they happened to get a tv show? Just stuff I wonder about sometimes.

Edited by Tri2Cook (log)

It's kinda like wrestling a gorilla... you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is tired.

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I found a simple solution to my extra cookbooks in good condition. Of course it works better living in a small town and having a library with a limited budget. I just donated a few cookbooks I have not used in a few years. I figure if I need them all of a sudden, I will just drop by and get sign it out.

So I still can use them, I just don't have to get another bookshelf. Perhaps they will inspire someone else to try some new cooking.

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When I moved from a four-bedroom house to a one-bedroom apartment, the cookbooks were the only part of my 1,200+ book collection that didn't get put into storage. That was 18 months ago.

The cookbooks sit in a single, large IKEA shelf that holds about 300 (give or take) and in the past 18 months, I have kept myself to that single unit. That means that when something new is bought, something has to go -- and, honestly, I have a pile of about 15 books sitting behind me that are ready to go.

They are books that haven't been opened at all in at least five years or, in the case of A Meal Observed, didn't interest me at all despite multiple attempts.

I have a similar strategy for my closet: If I haven't worn the garment in three to four years, it goes to the Goodwill.

In the case of books, I either utilize Book Crossing to give away the books or I bring them to a used bookstore for credit. Usually it is the former.

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Carolyn,

Since I work for a mental health agency, let me tell you what I heard you say. You have 15 books behind you that you haven't gotten rid of yet :wink: Remember, the first sign is admitting you have a problem.

And when you're pruning, consider donating them to your local high school's culinary program if they have one. Go here to find a local program.

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If anyone has any books they want to donate. The Eg Heartland Gathering this July in Cleveland is having a cookbook sale organized by moi. I will gladly accept your book donation at my PO Box in Michigan and I'll take them with me to the event. The money raised will go towards the society.

Edited by CaliPoutine (log)
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If anyone has any books they want to donate.  The Eg Heartland Gathering this July in Cleveland is having a cookbook sale organized by moi.  I will gladly accept your book donation at my PO Box in Michigan and I'll take them with me to the event.  The money raised will go towards the society.

Gee, how did this get past me? What a terrific way to raise some money for the Society. You'll be receiving a box from me!

Margaret McArthur

"Take it easy, but take it."

Studs Terkel

1912-2008

A sensational tennis blog from freakyfrites

margaretmcarthur.com

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Since I work for a mental health agency, let me tell you what I heard you say.  You have 15 books behind you that you haven't gotten rid of yet  :wink:  Remember, the first sign is admitting you have a problem.

And when you're pruning, consider donating them to your local high school's culinary program if they have one.  Go here to find a local program.

Nah, I'm not that bad.... it is only that they are stacked under a small, corner table and I don't see them often enough to remember they are there. Because I live in small quarters, I am rather anal about getting rid of stuff (never buy a new outfit without making sure there is a hangar to put it on sort-of-thing!).

Also, in a week or two I will be tackling a bigger task of emptying my storage unit and know there will be over 1,000 books I have to go through and discard. Because many of rare, first-editions, their disposal will take more care.

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  • 1 month later...
but I have a long-time battle going on between my cookbook collector side and my cheap side over whether or not I'm going to buy the El Bulli books. I really want them but don't need them and they aren't cheap.

Birthdays

"You dont know everything in the world! You just know how to read!" -an ah-hah! moment for 6-yr old Miss O.

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Most of the cookbooks I prune are the ones people have given to me. They just have no clue what makes a good cookbook or one suited to my interests. If I buy a cookbook, it is in the collection to stay. I sometimes borrow cookbooks from the library, but the core of my collection are either well used or obscure titles. The obscure titles are generally more in the vein of historical or cultural references. It is certainly a collection that keeps growing. I have filled 2 48" wide 7" tall bookcases. I prune my other books to make way for the cookbooks.

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I am by nature and training acquisitive; my cookbook collection has metastisized from a single case in my undergraduate years to a 2,000-volume library that sprawls across several rooms and into storage. And that's after pruning. As a former museum curator, I understand some of the considerations that go into making a good collections: utility, the ability to delight and educate, the cost of upkeep and, let's face it, the thrill of the chase for that one book you can't do without.

Any well-maintained collection needs to grow – by which I don't mean that it necessarily gets bigger. But it gets better. First editions might be your thing. Or cookbooks signed by authors. Maybe you start with some books that have writing in them and you want to upgrade to pristine copies. Could be that the writing for you is evidence of actual use and those marginalia, rather than being an annoyance, are an historical record (check that bookplate, too, to see who might have been making the notes). You make room for better quality books by losing the filler that doesn't educate, delight, or prove useful.

In 2006 I moved from Philadelphia to San Diego. You bet I pruned. Gone were most books that didn't relate to food in some way. The same with any books I hadn't cracked open since purchasing. It was a great chance to clear house and finally dispose of mediocre books, those that were simply modern collections of recipes with little or no social, historical, or ethnographic context.

My collection veers toward hardbacks and, increasingly, antiquarian cookery books - in fact, I'll upgrade to a well-preserved hardback if I've already got a paperback edition and pass on the paperback to a friend or colleague. It also skews toward foods that are preserved in some way – fermented, pickled, cured, etc. So sections on charcuterie, cheese, pickles/preserves, beer and spirits (moonshine and distilling, naturally) tend to go into more depth than, say, Indonesian or Austrian cookery.

It helps to prune by knowing what's NOT in your general interest. Though I have a lot on whiskeys, brandy, and cocktails, I have very few books dealing with wine - there are simply too many wine books to keep up. Same with community cookbooks. I just don't have the room to start that never-ending collection, outside a select few from the American South.

The depth and expense of the collection I justify to myself by knowing that I've got one of the best culinary libraries in town and that answers to many of my food questions are on the shelves around me. But I also learned something from chef Fritz Blank in Philadelphia; open your collections to others. Serious book collectors are secretive, protective, and competitive. They rarely let outsiders use their collections (maybe more territorial than protective at times). Fritz let researchers as well as any guest to his restaurant Deux Cheminees come into his 10,000-volume cookery library. I tapped his shelves more than once for 17th and 18th century distilling receipts as I researched my recent book on home distilling.

It's a model I adopted; users of my collection can't borrow books, but I do let writers, historians, cooks, chefs, journalists, restaurateurs, and culinary students use the collection here at my house. Scheduling can be a pain sometimes, but my visitors also bring me books, especially ones they have written. They call or email with questions and they incorporate materials from me on their menus, in their articles, and in their books. It's a nice trade off and makes me feel as if the real estate and expense of maintaining a robust cookery library is worth it.

And pruning is one way to make sure that the collection really is a value to me and others who might need answers to their culinary questions. That's probably a vestigal curatorial vein. Or sheer ego. Not sure. Time to go buy some food books.

~ Matthew

Matthew B. Rowley

Rowley's Whiskey Forge, a blog of drinks, food, and the making thereof

Author of Moonshine! (ISBN: 1579906486)

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  • 2 weeks later...

after reading a post here about how many books you own... I realize I have too many... need to clear up some space... If anyone is looking for extremely rare old French books from the early 1800'ss thru 1900's drop me an email...

Grimod

"Bacchus has drowned

more men then Neptune"

Thomas Fuller

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  • 6 years later...

We all love to collect cookbooks; we have many threads devoted to our cookbook collections, which cookbooks to buy, best of the year, best of type, etc.

What about when you want or need to cull your collection?

I just have too many and I need shelf space. I've devoted a lot of time to this activity already, sifting through the books, shifting my existing book collections around, moving things off the shelves to make space.

One of the ways I've been able to cull is to pull the many baking books I've received as gifts. My friends mean well, but they don't know what to pick. Then there's the books I've gotten for a couple of bucks. Some I can't bare to part with, but good cookbooks are really easy to find second hand -- most people who inherit them don't know what's good or of value.

I realize I have a lot of books that are strictly for reference, even if they aren't reference books. I've got a lot of books that I think are beautiful, particularly candy and cookie books, that I just want to have around and just want to look through. I also have an entire shelf of various shades of Asian cooking, and I don't cook Asian food . . .

What to do? How do you cull your collection?

I like to bake nice things. And then I eat them. Then I can bake some more.

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I bought a lot of cookbooks when I first really got into cooking (at university), and in retrospect, most of these are not particularly great cookbooks. I haven't ditched them yet (mostly because they've been packed away), but when they're unpacked soon, I don't see a need in keeping them.

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Obviously there are cookbooks that I'd never cull....no way...no how.

Cookbooks that are on the potential cull list generally only have a few recipes that I'm interested in anyway, so I don't usually find it a bit painful to save those recipes and then send the book off to eBay or wherever.

~Martin :)

I just don't want to look back and think "I could have eaten that."

Unsupervised, rebellious, radical agrarian experimenter, minimalist penny-pincher, and adventurous cook. Crotchety, cantankerous, terse curmudgeon, non-conformist, and contrarian who questions everything!

The best thing about a vegetable garden is all the meat you can hunt and trap out of it!

 

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I'm in the process of doing this now. It is taking much, much longer than it should. It is an (almost) impossible process. As someone mentioned above, I also bought many cookbooks (particularly baking books) when I first started learning and doing. Now I have more of an idea of what I like and which ones I actually will use, whether for reference or for the recipes. I brought several up to Housing Works yesterday, and I sold two a little while ago (they were particularly expensive books; buyer was happy, seller was happy). I also have a lot of the "discount" books, but some of them are so offbeat I want to hold on to them, even though I don't use them. Ay, there's the rub -- wanting to hold on to things, even if I don't use them. My non-food-related books are also a part of this winnowing, which is particularly difficult because re-reading is one of my favorite things in the world. Well, this should be my biggest problem in life!

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I've done some serious culling a couple of times. I try to be as cold-hearted as possible. My criteria are cooking usefulness (including reference information), reading enjoyment, and emotional association. First, I triage: absolutely no way, probably no way, possibly way. I then go through the possibly way group--more than once, if needed--and choose the lowest-rated, so to speak, based on those three criteria.

What helps is that I donate the departing books to my local community college's culinary program. Some go into their libray; the rest are available for students to take. All are tax-deductible, within the limits of the law.

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"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

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I have put books that I think I can part with in a box and put it in the basement. Later when I come across that box I look through it again. Seeing there is no more room on the shelf and I have not missed the books I usually take the box to the big second hand book store in town . Then at the counter if I have any regrets I take the book back home. That does not happen very often.

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I do this often---mainly because I buy cookbooks at the used bookstores and don't feel bad about spending $7 and under on hardbacks I might only use once or twice. I keep them 6 months to a year or so, then re-sell back to the same stores. Some books make the "keepers" cut, others are resold for bookstore credit. I've found fantastic bargains this way (first editions, signed copies, out of print treasures). I see it as "renting" the books for a while, then reselling to get a new batch to consider. I cull when the bookshelves get too full; I put the duds on specific shelves. Once the dud shelf is full, back to the bookstore I go.

As of late, I've also been buying single-topic cookbooks as e-books. I needed cracker & crisp recipes to develop materials for a cooking class, and it was way cheaper to buy 7-8 cracker cookbooks in e format over paper format. I won't be using them very often, but they're a nice recipe resource.

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Okanagancook, great process. I think I'll get onto it. Like others above, I too have the sort of cookbook that one buys in the beginning of a cooking career...except that I started very late...and should really part with the ones (which aren't too marked up, too stained, too broken, etc) which can still be recycled.

Darienne

 

learn, learn, learn...

 

We live in hope. 

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I have turned my family (daughter, SIL, son, DIL) loose at Christmas, asking them each to pick a certain number off my cookbook shelves. Each of them cooks, and they have different interests except they all like bread books. I have one bookshelf of "don't touch" books, and should they pick one off the other shelves that I'm not ready to give up, I write their name in it to have later. My best friend also comes in for a selection. I'm usually surprised by the books they choose, and sometimes I have to suggest a similar book I think they would like better.

All other books I either re-read and save, give to charity, or send to my niece, but I'm thinking I really need to sell some of those. I read about a book a day, and they do pile up.

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Ruth Dondanville aka "ruthcooks"

“Are you making a statement, or are you making dinner?” Mario Batali

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