I've been shopping at Barbara Gelink's secondhand cookbook store since moving to town. Tucked away in a little Kensington strip mall behind a liquor store, it's always been easy to overlook. There's no particular reason to peek down the narrow parking lot if you didn't have business there. Do so this week, however, and you'll notice a bright yellow banner announcing her going out of business sale. Her goal? Liquidate the stock and close shop by Christmas.
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| Grilled Fogas from József Venez's 1958 Hungarian Cuisine |
I didn't pay retail for my copy, but, damn; it wasn't that cheap.
The thing about secondhand American bookstores is that I've been prowling through them for years. Decades, actually, at this point. In casual hunting, many of the titles I find that grab my attention already sit on a shelf somewhere at home. Those secondhand books I do buy tend to be unusual, old, or esoteric. In the Kitchen with Rosie? Absolutely no interest; every thrift store from here to Rochester has copies to burn. At Gelink's, a fat overview of Austrian cookery, however, caught my eye. I picked up Das große Sacher-Kochbuch and four others for a total of $19.
For the next few days, I'll pick my way through a history of die österreichische Küche, some startling recipes from Hungary, a catalog of brumalian sweets, and, predictably, even more on German and Southern cookery.
What will you get?
The Cookbook Store
4108 Adams Avenue
San Diego, CA 92116
(619) 284-8224
Goes well with:
- My Culinary Library: What Good Does It Do? Once you find yourself with a few thousand books about food and drink, you've got to ask yourself: What's the point? Here's what I came up with.
2 comments:
Ooh, dear. Another brick and mortar store out of business. So many people keep laptops in their kitchen now to look up their recipes online. I'm so sorry.
Thanks for letting us know.
Hi, Mage ~
As I spend more time with my iPad, I become more enamored of its possibilities. If every single bit of my library — every recipe and essay, archival materials, all the ephemera, all of it — was scanned and filed in a searchable, hyperlinked database, I would use that tool every day. And I would get rid of books bought when I was younger but which would not pass muster on my current collecting criteria. But to get rid of them all in favor of a laptop or an iPad? Not a chance. When the power goes off, when the laptop grows obsolete, when the iPad gets stolen or lost, and batteries die, I still have my books.
As long as there are people like me around, books won't disappear, nor will the stores that cater to us, though they may end up looking different. For what it's worth, Barbara said she plans to keep selling cookbooks on her eBay store...though I'll miss the smell of old paper.
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