Reading Food : One Book That’s Essential for Collectors

One Hundred Books on California Food and Wine, edited by Dan Strehl (The Book Collectors: $40 plus tax from P.O. Box 104, Sunland, Calif. 91041; 64 pp.)

Since 1870, 3,000 California books about food and wine have been published. For someone who wants to collect in this specialized area, this tasteful little volume--a collector’s item in itself: handsomely designed, letterpress-printed in an edition of 300--is essential.

It’s a guide for assembling a distinguished collection of California books on food and wine, the result of two years’ work by a committee including some of the most knowledgeable people in the field. Some of the titles on the list are familiar and readily available; for others, only two or three copies are known to exist. (“These will be a challenge to acquire,” the introduction dryly remarks.)

Some facts come to light in this list that could interest even non-collectors. For instance, the very first book published in Los Angeles was a cookbook. Books have been compiled to raise money to save the California missions (edited by Charles Lummis, founder of the Southwest Museum) and to help victims of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A food conservation book written during World War I had a cover designed by the famous Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck. During the ‘50s, the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco published a guide to Chinese and Japanese food for Beatniks (and the tourists visiting North Beach to goggle at Beatniks).

A quarter of the titles are on wine, the earliest of them--by the vineyardist Agostin Haraszthy--actually predating the first California cookbook. Surprisingly, the only book by M.F.K. Fisher is one about wine.

To be sure, there’s reading matter as well as a list of books. Sylvia Vaughn Thompson writes on how she became a cookbook writer, Ward Ritchie on how against his better judgment he became a cookbook publisher (a particularly entertaining series of anecdotes), Marian Gore on how she became a dealer in old cookbooks.

Editor Dan Strehl’s own contribution is a survey of libraries with significant collections of California cookbooks, the most important, with 70% of the titles published before 1970, being his own Los Angeles Public Library, followed by collections at UCLA and the Huntington Library. Interestingly, Northern California, which had an early head start, doesn’t have much to offer apart from the wine libraries at Davis and St. Helena. “Outside of Los Angeles,” Strehl observes regretfully, “hunger sets in.”