I’m thinking of a nonfiction category at CLP—Main that contains more than 6000 books. Gardening? A catalog keyword search turns up 1839 titles. World War II? 2234 titles.
Maybe by now you’ve sniffed out my subject area du jour—cookbooks. The 6,303 titles in the stacks on the First Floor don’t even include new cookbooks. Those less than a year old are shelved with other new non-fiction in the main room of the First Floor.
Each month patrons check out between 800 and 1200 of these cookbooks. Individual books borrowed more than 100 times include Classic Indian Cooking by Julie Sahni (1980), Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant (1980), New Chinese Vegetarian Cooking by Kenneth Lo (1986), and The Greens Cookbook: Extraordinary Vegetarian Cuisine from the Celebrated Restaurant by Deborah Madison (1987).
Last week I attended a staff presentation given by our librarians who tend the TXs (that’s Library of Congress classification-speak for home economics books). Joanne and Karen work diligently to select, organize, and promote this grand collection.
Here are highlights of Joanne and Karen’s talk, in no particular order.
- Pies are the new cupcakes.
- TX current trends include artisan breads, sustainable/eating local, eating fresh, canning and preserving, eating raw.
- What’s most popular in our collection: vegan and vegetarian, tofu, slow cookers, smoothies, soups, baking, cake decorating.
- What’s not popular in our collection: grilling, meat, game, fish, entertaining and dinner parties.
- Classics and favorite cookbooks: Julia Child, Moosewood cookbooks, Craig Claiborne, M.F.K. Fisher, Fannie Farmer, Martha Stewart, Jacques Pépin.
- We attempt to provide cookbooks for every ethnic cuisine.
This image is from "The Medieval Cookbook," The Bodleian Library, Oxford. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Library Journal reported that cookbooks overtook medicine and health for the top spot in nonfiction circulation in public libraries last year. I’m not surprised that cookbooks circulate so frequently. Cookbooks provide welcome inspiration for breaking out of the dinner doldrums. And if your home library has a TX shelf, you know that cookbooks are expensive. Borrowing a cookbook to try a recipe before investing in the volume is smart.
—Julie
Eleventh Stack 
“Sunday’s at Moosewood” is one of my favorite cookbooks!
Glad to hear from one of the folks who love the Moosewood books! I think it’s interesting that of the four highest circulating cookbooks, three of them are vegetarian.
I love to just peruse cookbooks even if I don’t plan on making anything from them. They are so representative of the art of the possible–possible to create, possible to share, possible to be transported elsewhere. Yum!
Thanks for your reply. Your words remind me of somthing I read recently, a cookbook editor’s comment that “a cookbook gives you something special—a window into a particular culinary vision.” Books are a tool to spur the imagination—as you put it, the art of the possible.
It’s odd that cookbooks circulate so much; it seems most people just don’t cook anymore. Personally, I love cooking–and now much prefer my own food to eating out anywhere!