San Gabriel Dealer Offers Smorgasbord of Cookbook Titles : Food: Books in her 5,000-volume collection sell for as little as $10 or as much as $2,100.

Marian L. Gore has always had an insatiable appetite for books about food and drink.

But make no mistake. For this antiquarian bookseller, who has nearly 5,000 titles in her collection, a good read is as important as a good recipe.

“There are lots of people who go to bed at night and read cookbooks,” Gore said. “But they are not reading about white sauce. Cookbooks are not just about food.

“They are like a bouillabaisse, filled with lots of interesting things.”

Her favorite books about food are by such authors as California’s M. F. K. Fisher, the Pulitzer Prize winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and essayist Calvin Trillin.

“They don’t write cookbooks,” Gore said. “They write about food in a way that is much more interesting than a laundry list of ingredients. They tell anecdotes about their experiences with food and dining. . . . One reads their books and grows hungry.”

Gore, who runs her business out of her San Gabriel home, offers cookbooks by mail order to catalogue customers and at her home by appointment. Her collection recently was mentioned in Bon Appetit magazine.

To satisfy her mailing list of 750 collectors, Gore is constantly on the lookout for tomes such as “A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband,” “The Working Girl Must Eat” and a rare piece of World War I memorabilia, the “Belgian Relief Cookbook.”

“I was talking with a dealer the other day who told me he was retiring,” Gore said from the dark, book-lined office in her home. “He said he would never stop looking for rare books. I understood exactly what he meant. It’s an addiction.”

A slim woman with blue-gray eyes, Gore learned her trade by working for several used-book dealers. In the mid-1960s she started buying historic, rare and out-of-print books on food and drink. Then, in 1967, she published her first catalogue and has continued to put out about two catalogues a year since.

Categories in Gore’s collection include European cookbooks; books about wine, beer and bartending; guides to hotels, restaurants and inns; and, of course, books about California cuisine.

Some books sell for as little as $10, including “Favorite Recipes of Our Friends” by the Cafeteria Club of the St. Gabriel School. Others, such as Abby Fisher’s 1881 work, “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,” go for as much as $2,100.

Another valuable book Gore plans to peddle is the first cookbook by an American to be published in the United States. The leather-bound edition of “American Cookery: Or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables. And the Best Mode of Making Puff-Pastes, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, From the Imperial Plum, to Plain Cakes,” was published in 1819. Gore has not decided exactly how much to charge for that volume.

Gore, who has traveled all over the world in pursuit of rare books, said her favorite part always has been the search. “The excitement of finding something new never diminishes,” she said.

Catalogues are available for $4 by writing to Marian L. Gore, Bookseller, Box 433, San Gabriel, Calif., 91778-0433.