One year ago: Marian L. Gore

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What Marian L. Gore sold, she told The Times in 1974, was nostalgia.

The antiquarian bookseller, who died a year ago at 95, specialized in historic tomes about food and wine. From 1967 through 1991, she sold them out of her San Gabriel home.

‘Favorite Recipes of Our Friends’ by the Cafeteria Club at St. Gabriel School might sell for $10, while Abby Fisher’s 1881 ‘What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking’ could go for $2,100.

Young people particularly ‘feel it must have been better then -- it had to be better. They buy these books out of a feeling of nostalgia,’ Gore once said, ‘sort of relishing of the qualities of a world where people did not operate by shortcuts.’

-- Valerie J. Nelson