My book collecting is magpie-ish, a quilt of scraps rather than a finely-woven cloth. The two parallel columns — cookery and Classics — really have very little to do with one another (though their rare overlap, viz. Apicius, whose best manuscript at the New York Academy of Medicine I’d be keen to acquire if they ever sold it, is perhaps most appealing). I am a recovering Classicist and an active cook, but my collecting is split more evenly than that would indicate.
Magpies can’t be choosers, and as a result a great many prized books on my shelves are gifts. Some would say this disqualifies me from true book-collecting, but I beg to differ. Collecting seems to have an overlay of wealth, such that one’s purse dictates one’s possessions. Doubtless our Club’s namesake felt that his books were his despite the motto’s claim that they were his friends’ (“… et amicorum”); amici could receive but not give the books to any others than their co-amici; anyone to whom Grolier would pass a book was thus an amicus and ipso facto a bibliophile. Why, then, should the converse not be true? I am lucky enough to have friends of greater means than mine, and I have made them extensions of my collecting. Both books I’ve proposed for the exhibition belong to this category.
Giuseppe Spalletti’s 1781 rendition of the sixth century BCE lyric poet Anacreon’s cheery verses isn’t quite an edition proper as it presents a single witness rather than multiple toward an improved text, but transmits in copper-plate facsimile the relevant pages (676-691) of the “Palatine Anthology,” Vatican codex Vat. gr. 23. This is followed by a three-column printing of the text as transmitted, a (gentle) rendering into standard Ancient Greek and a Latin translation (by Barnes). It’s not a scholarly object, but it celebrates the materiality of ancient text in a way an archaeologist can appreciate. This was given to me by my first mentor in the world of antiquarian bookselling, David Johnson.
Elizabeth David. English Bread and Yeast Cookery. London: Allen Lane, 1977.
This is James Beard’s copy of Elizabeth David’s 1977 English Bread and Yeast Cookery. It’s a book I first devoured in a foul paperback whose glue-binding was perishing as I read. It explains a great deal about the staff of life, including the origin of a baker’s dozen and why French bread has always been superior to English or Italian. Beard, from whose 1973 Beard on Bread I learned to bake, must have seen how superior David’s work was. The book was a reward of sorts from a late collector — mother of a current Grolier member — of cookbooks whose collection I catalogued. She asked my rate, and after many demurrals I was given a half-case of half-bottles of claret too expensive for me to enjoy and this.
