Cookery books and other books - are you keeping them ?

I enjoy cookery books, our children can bin them later.

Elegran Your last two posts were music to my ears.

I cannot remember a time when I wasn't curious about finding out about what was going on in the world. My childhood wish lists had one word on them - books - and by that I mean non-fiction. I would rather read an encyclopedia than a novel any day.

I was on my university's University Challenge team and when I began working, my whole career was based on finding the information other people needed and organising it so that they received the information in the form that they needed it in.

I loved the days before everything was online, physically tracing down the libraries that would contain the documents with the information I wanted, going to the libraries and sitting at a desk and handling the documents extracting the information I wanted. Long telephone marathons tracking down the one person who had the one bit of information I needed. I went back to university and studied the science of Information.

But most of all it is having the books around me to see, to touch and to smell. As the author, Anthony Powell titled one of his books 'Books do furnish a room'

When we moved to this bungalow I unfortunately had to give the majority of my books to charity as we have much less storage room. I've kept about 5 recipe books

I have over 600 cookery books … I know I should start to get rid of them and not leave them for anyone else to sort out. But saying that it goes for all the stuff in my house dinner sets, fish knives!! Cake stands casserole dishes!!! The list goes on!!

I’ve got rid of most of my cookery books - I have a file of favourite recipes, often just one or two from each book. One I have kept for ages is the GH Cooking For Company, a present a couple of years before I was married - so maybe 1972! - still my ‘Bible’ for Christmas recipes.

A few years ago it was falling to bits - I found an identical copy online, probably via abebooks.
Also still have an ancient Hamlyn All Colour cookbook, published around 1970, with a photo of a very young Mary Berry in the front!
But that could go - it’s also falling to bits. I only really use a couple of recipes so should cut them out.

Book dilemma! First of all I went through the books then photocopied any recipe I used a lot as invariably a large book only had a couple Of favorites, then I gave them to charity. Recently I have bought x2 from a charity shop which I love in The Pinch of Nom series. Re non cookery books, I am a voracious reader so any I had with tiny print or smelled musty went. I have a wonderful library or buy secondhand. Well done for identifying that you have too many.

Sorry to scare you, Grammaretto It comes of a youthful interest in libraries as repositories of the records of the inventiveness of past authors, both of fiction and non-fiction, and being being old enough to have done all my early family history early searching in actual physical hand-written church lists of births marriages and deaths. The are coupled with first using a computer in the days when you could only give it instructions by typing them in code onto a blue screen, and only save your work by connecting your computer to a reel-to-reel tape recorder that took ages.

Subsequently, saving hours of work was done using a series of different storage methods, changing through various tape cassettes, floppy discs, etc and then digital CDs, mini-discs, USB sticks, cards, and so on, getting smaller all the time, and with each needing a connection to a different hardware device to access it and play it back on. The latest way to preserve information is to save it to "the cloud" which is one of the enormous data banks built by whoever has the vast amounts of money needed to do so.

Each new way to preserve stuff for posterity was enthusiastically embraced, and new hardware sold for it, which didn't connect to the older computers physically and/or needed new software as well to interpret what was stored on it, so to keep your storage technique working, you had to buy a new machine.

To start with, computers were made to use both new and old storage devices, but as the old devices became redundant, the connections for them and the software to read them were dropped - so anything that was recorded on the old tape cassettes is now lost to a modern computer, and anything on a CD is going the same way.

All the information that has been digitised and saved to the cloud can only be read if you have a computer powered by electricity, locked with a password, and dependent on the existence of the massive machines which hold the information, which are also powered by electricity (lots and lots of it) and vulnerable to being destroyed in an all-out bombing campaign.

However, if you managed to print things out on that oldfashioned medium, PAPER, you probably still have it somewhere.

When I had to move nearer to family 3 years ago I had a spare room with 7 large bookcases filled to the brim with Ancient History books & SciFi& Fantasy fiction. Every one had been read at least twice! Broke my heart sitting in the middle of them putting aside the ones I could not bear to part with! Found our local Oxfam would take all that I wanted to give them as they were asked for my type of books but did not have very many. So hopefully went to some good homes! Now have a very small spare room with 3 large bookcases packed with my favs & could do with more room as I cannot stop buying books on my favourite subjects! Sad bat me but love books having worked in libraries for a very long time!

I'm not throwing out all my books Elegran but my library needs to be thinned.
That's a scary scene you paint 😯

We have a local National Trust property which has a second hand bookshop and they are always pleased to accept decent second hand books.

It isn't just a question of monetary value, though, or whether you get your recipes, quiz answers or general knowledge from your books or from your Ipad.

In this uncertain world that we are currently living in, who knows what will happen this year, next year, or sometime in the near future, let alone further ahead? Old alliances are breaking up, old enmities resurfacing and new threats appearing where we don't expect them. We don't know what our children or grandchildren will have to experience.

If any tyrant should decide to take over our country, the first thing to happen, and probably the first thing that would be noticed, would not be an invading army with hobnailed boots and fixed bayonets but that all means of long-distance communication and all electric power had simultaneously gone silent (apart perhaps from a repeated broadcast of a Dalek-type announcement on the lines of "All resistance is futile. Just do exactly as ordered" until the devices ran out of power and could not be recharged.)

If no-one had any internet connection, or even any telephone contact, how would we find out anything at all that wasn't in our personal memory, or in a printed book on our own own bookshelves? Even a laptop or mobile phone is only useful while it is charged up and while someone is maintaining the servers with the information on them, and keeping them up-to-date and online.

What might we want to access? Names and locations of people in positions of power, of medical facilities and personal, of practitioners of practical services like plumbers, electrical and gas engineers, farmers and nurserymen and primary suppliers of food of all kinds, owners of horsedrawn vehicles which could replace the petrol-fuelled ones which could have been commandeered by invaders or be unable to get fuel. We might want to get information on how to keep food fresh, cook it, heat our homes and purify possibly polluted water supplies without using electricity, how to construct a septic tank in our back garden to hygienically deal with our waste if the sewage system is destroyed, or how to build a waterproof shelter out of whatever we can find.

Once we knew what was going on, and who we were dealing with, we might want to know how to make Molotov cocktails and set lethal booby traps, build crystal radios and communicate in morse code, use cryptic codes to disguise our messages, and read how others in the same situation fought and won a guerrilla war. Then we might need a blueprint for rebuilding a shattered country, or even a whole civilisation.

Public libraries are likely to be victims of such a conflict, both physically from attack and politically from regimes which want to control who has access to information. Read Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which paper bursts into flame). Read 1984 too. The predicted date may be safely past, but the possibilities sound nearer every week.

Information sources like newspapers and internet sources can be taken over by those with money to buy or power to enforce, and edited so that they reflect what "they" want the public to know - both about the news and the "how-to" side of information technology. It is not so easy to silence the humble bookshelves in every house, or the cardboard boxes in the attic containing the knowledge of past generations.

Vintagegirl

One could exacavate a cavity in a thick book to make a safekeeping space?

Oooh! That’s a really good idea!👍🏻

One could exacavate a cavity in a thick book to make a safekeeping space?

We have a small house but a friend who has four bedrooms has turned one of them into a library! It’s lovely, walls full of books and a couple of comfy chairs and a lamp.So if you have the room and wish to keep your books think about doing that?

HelterSkelter1

PS I am using unwanted books to support some planks of wood in a bedroom alcove to make some, "temporary" but have lasted many years, shelves.

DP has done the same using books to prop up a wonky computer table😁
My DD’s want my cookery books but they can only have them if they take them from my cold dead hands😂
Other books are regularly culled by giving/ swapping with friends.

For anyone with Facebook, there is a very active Be-Ro group that has every past recipe listed under “Files”, several posts a day from keen home bakers, and they are very good at dating books from a photo of the cover. Old Be-Ro books sell for ridiculously inflated prices on eBay, but the current version is available to order online from the Be-Ro website very reasonably. It has good recipes, of course, but the nostalgia of the old books can’t be measured and is a price worth paying for many misty memories!

We have a wall outside our house and when I'm having a book cull, I just put them on there. They usually all go. I like to think of them going to a new home. One book I'll always keep is The Cookery Year (Readers' Digest). It was a wedding present from a friend whose father did some of the illustrations for it and it's been brilliant. But like most of us, I tend to think, oh beef stroganoff (or whatever) and just google it.

My hubs and I could open a retail book shop ..

cc

loopyloo

Some old books are very valuable. At least that's what I tell myself.
But you people have the right idea.
Must start the clear out.

I've always understood that a book has to be in virtually immaculate condition to be valuable.
Our local charity shop (specialising in books) welcomes cookery books, apparently they sell very well here. I'm guessing that they cull the ones in bad condition and the boring ones though.

No, whether a book is valuable has relatively little to do with condition inless it is the first edition of a popular or prolific author, or the first edition print run was very low.

In the field I am interested in, the value of books is driven more by demand than condition. Certain key texts etc, may have had a relatively short print run because, in an arcane field they covered, that was all they thought they could sell. Then the field of study becomes more popular and as this is a key text, demand for a book that may have been out of print for years suddenly soars.

I have a number of books I bought for £20 or less when first published that could now be sold for £100 or more.

When I have books to dispose of, I first check their value online. If valued at £20 or more, I put them on ebay, if less than £20, they go to a charity shop. All subject specialist books go to an Oxfam specialist shop in a university town.

My Australian grandchildren have already put in requests to inherit all my cookbooks when I kick the bucket.

I often wonder whether a local foodbank could do with them, given the remarks made about some ingredients when offered about not knowing what to do with them.

I use my Milk Marketing Board book regularly as I really struggle to remember quantities, and do not want my electronic equipment getting messy.

I have a folder of aunt's and mine, gathered over the years that I consult if looking for something different, but my laptop/pad has a number more

I have many cookery books- some were my sisters cook books (now deceased) I couldn’t bare to part with them as she had hand written notes on some recipes inside.
Mine are mainly foreign cook books & two huge binders of recipes I’ve cut out of magazines.

loopyloo

Some old books are very valuable. At least that's what I tell myself.
But you people have the right idea.
Must start the clear out.

I've always understood that a book has to be in virtually immaculate condition to be valuable.
Our local charity shop (specialising in books) welcomes cookery books, apparently they sell very well here. I'm guessing that they cull the ones in bad condition and the boring ones though.

Cornergran Great idea about ropping out favourites and storing in plastic folder. Next rainy day I'll be doing that.

Meant to say that a friend said I was giving away my history but I asked him what my DC would do with them.