COOKBOOK CENTRAL

Saturday morning at the Cook’s Library, Ellen Rose is slicing strawberries behind the bookshelves. Another sort of bookstore owner might be wedging new titles onto the shelves or fluffing the sofa where customers can sit and consider what to buy. Rose is serving home-baked coffeecakes.

A Saturday regular saunters through the screen door. “How are you, Jim?” she asks. “Ready for breakfast?” Behind her bookish eyeglasses and honey-colored bangs lurks a charmer with a gift for making people feel welcome.

A minute later, Jim Gidlow, a Los Angeles public defender who says he rarely cooks but reads cookbooks as if they were novels, is comparing Rose’s sour cream coffeecake and dark gingerbread. Before long, so are half a dozen other customers, who juggle plates and flowered napkins as they study book titles.

Stacks of Jamie Oliver’s “The Naked Chef,” Alice Waters’ “Chez Panisse Fruit” and “A Real American Breakfast,” by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison, fill the display table. A flea market purchase with lemon yellow legs, the table fits the shop’s cozy decor. Hooked rug samplers and green ceramic vases, a wing chair covered in a fruit-print fabric and an ivory-handled cake server look as if Rose brought them from home.

But it is cookbooks that get people talking to strangers in this store. Located just down 3rd Street from the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, it is one of fewer than a dozen all-cookbook stores in the United States. Most cookbook lovers rank it among the two best, along with Nach Waxman’s Kitchen Arts and Letters in New York.

“There are very few stores like this in the country,” said Cheryl Jamison. She and her husband were at the Cook’s Library one Saturday to sign “A Real American Breakfast.” “Nach’s and Ellen’s stores are the best in the country.”

But while Waxman’s store caters primarily to the professional, Cook’s Library appeals to insider and amateur alike. “I meet a lot of nice people in here,” says Gidlow, who is in his 50s and who wears bluejeans for his weekly trek to the store. “I always hear about new restaurants and learn things about cooking.”

Scooter Kanfer, the chef at The House on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, brings her student interns to the shop. “It’s an important resource,” says Kanfer, who specializes in American regional cooking. “Sometimes I’ll sit in the shop for hours. It’s a hub. Ellen provides a special service to the community.”

Kanfer looks for offbeat pamphlets and classics to add to her Americana collection. These hard-to-find items are part of what makes Cook’s Library special. Tucked on the shelves among the flashiest book titles are at least 6,000 others to consider. They range from ethnic and international to American regional, from beginner to professional level.

Dig deep enough and you’re likely to stumble on total surprises: church supper cookbooks from middle America; Junior League anthologies by self-publishing socialites; Korean and Russian, Colombian and Greek cookbooks, all neatly shelved and clearly marked by region. There’s also a wide selection of cooking magazines and newsletters, some of which are usually only available by subscription. The tidiness contradicts every assumption you might have about passion and chaos. They don’t have to go together.

For anyone accustomed to chain stores with spotty cookbook collections, or neighborhood bookstores that are better at special-ordering than stocking cookbooks, the Cook’s Library can be a dizzying experience.

And something of a marvel. The store thrives despite the nearby chain stores that discount books. It takes creative thinking. “We have to offer books that no one else has, things you can’t even get on the Internet,” Rose says. Over the years she has developed a clientele of chefs and restaurant owners who call her for foreign titles she comes across in her own travels.

Cookbook authors come to town, and Rose takes them to the Farmers Market, a few blocks from the shop, for maximum exposure. Months before the Christmas rush, she finagles advertising supplements for new cookbooks that won’t be in the store until the holidays. She tacks the promotional pages to the store bulletin board and uses them to make advance sales.

“Business goes up and down,” says Rose, who can get excited about the challenge even when she is complaining. “It’s much tougher than it was before the discount chain stores came in. We can’t afford expensive book promotions, but we keep a huge selection of books, and the staff is very knowledgeable. We can sell hundreds of copies of a book if we like it. We’ll put it right in our customer’s hand and tell them all about it. We test the recipes and know what they’re like.”

That’s right, the staff members test recipes in their spare time. Rose is a fanatic who is likely to be found reading the “meats” section of some new publication at 3 in the morning if she can’t sleep. Store manager Tim Fischer is every bit as obsessed. A cherub-faced man in his 40s, he spent years as a pastry cook at New York’s Gotham Bar & Grill and invents special-occasion menus that he writes on the store blackboard to inspire shoppers. He tactfully advises customers about the right book for them. “He’ll tell me, ‘This book isn’t for you; too hard,’” says Gidlow, the occasional cook. “I appreciate the candor.”

Personal touches and a voracious appetite for every detail about recipes, menus, techniques, flavor and ingredients slant store conversation in a particular direction. Rose, now in her mid-50s, opened her shop 13 years ago after a career as a television commercial producer and a few years as a carpooling mom. “My daughter gave me the idea for the store,” she says. “She looked at my cookbook collection one day and said I had enough to start a library.”

It took 12 of the 13 years to build up the store’s inventory, which she continues to work on with the help of a picker who finds unusual books for her. But nothing has helped earn her a reputation more than her unquenchable appetite for everything new in the cookbook world.

“We had Nigella Lawson’s books before they were published in the U.S,” she says of the curvaceous kitchen goddess from England. “I found them when I was in London. Now we’re ordering books from Australia, New Zealand and Alaska. Terrific books, but besides that, I have customers who would rather learn about a country by reading about the food than studying the history.”

One such customer, Desmonette Hazly, spent $140 on a recent afternoon in the store. She was at home for several months between assignments as an international social worker. Hazly buys cookbooks about the countries where she is assigned to work. “Sometimes I take the cookbooks with me and compare what is in them to what people are actually eating,” she says. She was in the store to buy books about Brazil, where she will spend several months working at an orphanage for children with AIDS.

For Rose, every category of cookbook reminds her of certain customers. Doctors want how-to books, especially on bread baking. “They’re interested in the process,” she says. Slow-cooker books get swept up by mothers who want a beginner’s book for their grown-up children. “After Sept. 11 I had women who live in New York City coming into the store, looking for comfort food cookbooks,” Rose says. “They had come to Los Angeles to cook for their children and wanted to leave behind a basic book.”

Young women in their 20s ask for fondue cookbooks. Sunday nights they cook together with friends, Rose says. And parents of grammar school kids cleaned out the Afghan cookbooks she had in stock. “The kids were doing school projects,” Rose explains. “They cooked an Afghan dish. It’s another way to learn about a country.”

Browsers who spend time in the shop are certain to collect a few tips among the book titles. “You should smear walnut oil in the bundt pan, not butter!” Rose announced to the room one recent afternoon. She learned this while testing the recipe for sour cream coffeecake.

“It makes a subtle difference, but you can really taste it,” she explains. “I learn something new all the time.”

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Cook’s Library, 8373 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles. (323) 655-3141. The store’s annual sidewalk sale of used cookbooks is June 1.