Famous for Used Cookbooks

Although Cook’s Library is the only store in the Los Angeles area specializing in new cookbooks, there is another that sells only used cookbooks. Janet Jarvits Bookseller, late of Burbank, now in Pasadena, has a national reputation as a place to find the old, odd or out of the way.

At any given time, Jarvits may have up to 15,000 cookbooks in her store, just north of the Foothill Freeway. More than half are sold through her Web site (www.cookbkjj.com), but she does a lot of walk-in business as well.

Among the store’s highlights (and, actually, one of the reasons for its existence) is the huge collection of community cookbooks Jarvits bought in the early ‘90s from the estate of famed West Coast cookbook author Helen Evans Brown and her husband, Phillip.

It was the purchase of those roughly 10,000 books that finally convinced her to move the mail-order cookbook business she had started in 1989 out of her studio apartment and into an actual store. “It was a giant boost for me,” she says. “First of all, because I learned so much from that collection. But also because when I bought it I didn’t have enough money to pay for the whole thing--I had to keep making payments, so I had to really sell a lot.”

Jarvits opened in Burbank in 1994 and, in February 2001, moved to a larger location in the area becoming known as Pasadena’s Book Row. “We’re pretty much of a generalist cookbook store with leanings toward large collections of international cookbooks published in various countries and American regional cookbooks,” she says.

Janet Jarvits Bookseller, 1388 E. Washington Blvd., Pasadena. (626) 296-1638. Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Russ Parsons