Today, as I was walking into the library where I have worked for almost fifteen years--this cold early April day--I took the route that goes over the heating vent grate for the building. Mmm, it was warm. My heart starts to beat a bit faster when I get there because I am almost to the door, and I know that I will be putting my nose to the grindstone in a few minutes, getting the proper sequence of Gs, Cs, As and Ts in the next biochemistry paper that I will edit and upload.I gingerly stepped along the slick tines of the grate and the familiar smell of library book dust wafted up, as it does all winter. But only today, after all these years, did I really pay attention to it. It has a distinctive odor. It's probably teeming with a unique set of microscopic flora, and that may be one reason it has that familiar scent. Now I will wonder.
As I was noticing the dust smell, it occurred to me that we must have a cookbook collection in this huge library. I know have cataloged a few cookbooks over the years, though I'm pretty sure they all went to another library on East Campus. I went down to where the TXs are and found the cookbook "collection," if you can call five books a collection. There were about 30 books that you might find in a cookbook collection anywhere, but only a handful of the really usual kind, with recipes. Many others were, say, memoirs of food writers, sanitation manuals, books of pesticide residue on foods. And not one book was remotely new. This is not our area of expertise here.
Here are some of the very few titles I found:
Dubious Honors by M. F. K. Fisher (North Point, 1988)Candlelight and Cookery by Carlos de Florez (B. Wheelwright, 1952)
Good Cooking with Herbs and Spices by Frank Dorn & Eleanor Langdon (Harvey House, 1958)
The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz (M. Evans, 1967)
Vegetable Cookery by Florence LaGanke Harris (Wyn, 1952)
At Home on the Range, or, How to Make Friends with Your Stove by Margaret Yardley Potter (Lippincott, 1947)
Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century (Including the Forme of Cury) edited by Constance B. Hieatt & Sharon Butler (Oxford University Press, 1985)
Not a bad collection if you think of it from an academic perspective, I suppose. But I really love to walk into a research library where there's a large collection of such books and walk through the cookbook aisles. It's more satisfying in some ways than walking into an all-new books bookstore, and even better than going into a used bookstore with a good cookbook collection. The great thing about libraries is that librarians deliberately select books for a collection, making it quality-dense. The collection is curated, just like the objects in a museum are, or selected for the collection like an interior designer might choose just the right things for a room. If you know how to look at it just so, you can even see bits of the collector's personality shine through. Was this person health-minded?, an über-collector who had trouble getting rid of things?, a foodie-type? You can tell.
As I indicated, we clearly do not have a cookery liaison for this library. I'll have to amble over to the other campus to look at the collection there sometime. For now, I will be happy reading the few that I picked up today in our small, but appropriate, collection:
Love Lies a Loss: An Autobiography, 1946-1959 by Theodora FitzGibbon,
The Story of Bread by Ronald Sheppard & Edward Newton, and
Between Friends: M.F.K. Fisher and Me by Jeannette Ferrary.
Get that book dust moving a little bit.
