"cookbook collections" news and stories

With more than 3,500 cookbooks from the late Gourmet Magazine library just added to its collection, New York University's Fales Library Food Studies Collection has something major to cheer about. Slashfood attended the a recent celebration honoring award-winning cookbook author Rozanne Gold for her generous donation that made the acquisition possible. We caught up with Marvin J. Taylor, Director, The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University to get the scoop on what's really on the shelves.

Slashfood: What makes The Fales Library Food Studies Collection the largest and most important in the country?
Marvin J. Taylor: First, sheer size. We hold more volumes than any of the other collections. It's most important because our collection looks at food from a cultural standpoint, not just from nutrition, science, women's studies, etcetera, but from all these viewpoints at once.

How many cookbooks are in the collection?
MJT: I'm not sure, but we estimate that there are 55,000 volumes and counting.

75 year old Sally LaRhette has over 3000 cookbooks, and she's still going. She even had to move into a new house to fit them all!

I'm starting to collect cookbooks too. Right now I have a measley 15 books, but I've tried to be well-rounded in the books that I buy, to make sure that each book is a little bit different, focusing on a different type of cooking and can teach me something new. At what point does it stop being about that and just become about collecting the books themselves, regardless of whether or not you're interested in the recipes inside? Not to say that anyone who has this many cookbooks isn't interested in the recipes, but it seems like there would come a point where a) finding the recipe you want might be difficult, and b) all the food you'd ever want to eat or make would have been reached in cookbook number...35? 206? 900? Is it the history inside the books?

But I shouldn't talk. I own a few hundred matchbooks, and I don't even smoke.