The Cookbook Collector

by Allegra Goodman

  “This one’s in rough shape.” He showed the volume’s wear to the seller, even as he noted hers. She was about his age, but she looked shattered, as though she had never recovered from some early loss. Gray-eyed, sharp-featured, she was tall and pear-shaped. Her long gray hair fell straight past her narrow shoulders to her waist. She might have been a teacher once, or a social worker, but more likely she was a perpetual student, and a case study all her own. Her name was Sandra McClintock, and she wore faded clothes and cowboy boots, and she walked everywhere. She told George she’d only brought him two books because she didn’t want to carry any more. He did not believe her. “The cover is ripped,” he said. “The pages here are stained….” He turned the leaves deliberately.

  Were there others like these? Better? And how were they acquired? He tried to look diffident as he wrote a check, one hundred dollars for the pair.

  “Are they all cookbooks?” George asked the seller, but she didn’t want to discuss the matter. “Are you interested in an appraisal?”

  “Maybe. I might be.” She didn’t object to the evaluation, but she looked disappointed as she took the check. Clearly she had hoped for more.

  George fretted after she left that she would not come back. What if Sandra had something really valuable? He waited three days for her to call, and when she didn’t, he phoned, and asked to see her. She did not want him to come to her, and so he invited her to bring more books to the store. Had she contacted another dealer? He knew all the dealers in the area. He would have heard. Was she setting up an auction? He didn’t ask.

  He wanted Jess to hurry up and fly home for Thanksgiving. He was afraid Sandra might arrive while he was out and leave books with Jess, or even allow Jess to open them and ooh and ahh and say, “Those must be worth a fortune!” This scenario seemed unlikely, given Sandra’s cautious approach, but Jess had a way of bounding in at the worst moments. She had asked once, in front of college students with a box of books to sell, why George paid so little for contemporary novels.

  “Because they’re ephemera,” he said.

  “All of them? Even Thomas Pynchon?” Jess held up a battered paperback copy of V. “Even Saul Bellow? Humboldt’s Gift for a dollar?”

  After he’d bought a stack of novels and chucked the rest and said good-bye to the students, he clapped his hand on Jess’s shoulder. “Do you think I want a running commentary on prices? When I want your analysis of the book-buying business, I’ll ask you. In the meantime, let’s treat this as a store, not a seminar.”

  She didn’t look in the least contrite. “I was talking about literature, not analyzing the book-buying business. And if I were, I wouldn’t confuse a seminar with a store. And I wouldn’t confuse a store with a folly.”

  “A folly,” he echoed, incredulous, offended.

  “A folly like an expensive hobby,” she said, assuming he didn’t know the term. “A folly like a little miniature ruined castle in a garden.”

  “‘Little miniature’ is redundant,” he pointed out.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d like my folly to be a little less expensive, which is why I want you to stop theorizing about my prices in front of customers.”

  “All right, fine.”

  Tuesdays and Thursdays were peaceful. George’s other assistant, Colm, was discreet, spectacled, a tenth-year graduate student writing on Victorian commonplace books and the art of quotation. Far better for Sandra to meet Colm. He was judgmental too, but indirect.

  However, as George feared, Sandra dropped in on a Monday.

  “Hello,” said Jess. “May I help you?”

  Sandra hesitated. “I’m here with a book for George.”

  “We don’t buy books on Mondays,” Jess informed her.

  “Sandra,” cried George, rushing from the back room, “come with me.” There was no door between the store’s two rooms. Bookcases simply poured through the open passageway. “Watch your step,” George warned. The back room was a full step down.

  “I was thinking,” Jess said, following them, “we should install a ramp here.”

  George gestured her away.

  “We could get one made of plywood, and then if we straightened out the front entrance, we’d be almost wheelchair and stroller accessible.”

  “Jessamine,” said George, and she understood and backed off.

  “I have one more book to show you,” Sandra told him. “But this is the last one.”

  “The last one you have?”

  “The last one I’ll show.”

  Why is that? George thought with sudden dread. Is she saving the rest for someone else? But he said, “Let’s have a look.”

  She unwrapped a pristine copy of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. “It’s the first British edition—with the recipe.” Sandra turned to the page with the title “Toklas’ Haschich Fudge.”

  The original hashish brownies. Peppercorns, nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander, stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds, peanuts, … A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts … it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient….

  “True,” said George.

  “What do you think?” Sandra asked at last.

  “It’s not perfect.” He pointed to the tiniest of tears on the dust jacket, the spots freckling the title page.

  “You don’t want it?” She needed money.

  “I want it.” The book was charming. It was very good. Of course he wanted it. But what he really wanted was to see the rest. What sort of trove was this? The whole duty and Alice B. Toklas cohabiting on the shelves? “I’d be happy to appraise your whole collection,” he said once again. “If the other books are in this kind of condition …”

  Sandra looked grave.

  “Even if they’re not …”

  He heard the shop door. He felt a gust, a moment of traffic and chilly winter; heard Jess’s voice. “Hey!” A man’s voice, a rustling as the door closed again. Sandra and George stood together as before, examining the book, but subtly the climate in the store had changed. Jess was talking to a friend in the other room. He guessed Noah from Save the Trees. Jess had introduced the kid to George several weeks ago, calling him Director of Trees or VP of Tree-Saving, almost as though she were practicing for her parents, as if to say, This young man is not only idealistic, but management material as well. Yes, there he was leaning against a table stacked with books. Tall, wiry Noah with the frayed jeans, holes in the back pockets. He of the long arms and wide brown boyish eyes. Noah who was always touching everything. George tried not to notice. In fact, he refused to look.

  “Really? You’re so lucky!” Jess trilled to Noah in the other room. “I want to go there.”

  “You should come with us,” Noah said.

  George couldn’t help imagining Jess sailing away with Noah. Surely they’d sail across the sea on Noah’s nonprofit ark. He hoped they would.

  Even as he ushered Sandra out, he heard muffled laughter. He couldn’t see Jess and Noah anymore, but he sensed them in Medieval History. He knew the sounds of flirting in his store. The rustles and faint scufflings between the shelves, the creak of bookcases leaned upon, the squeak of the rolling step stool.

  Jess, he chided silently, does he have to be one of those idiots who lie down in front of logging trucks? Really, now. But of course she had to find a leftie leafleter who shouted, “Would you like to save our forests today? Our trees go back to Biblical times!” to complete strangers on the street.

  He had never seen Jess in action at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, but he could picture her. “Our trees predate Henry James. They gave their lives for him.”

  “You’re not serious,” he heard Noah tell Jess.

  “I am,” she said. “I’m afraid of heights.”

  “I can’t believe you’d work for Save the Trees and never want to … experience them!”

  “Can’t you experience them from the ground
?”

  Now he was whispering.

  Silence.

  “Jess,” George called.

  No answer—as if to say, Oh, now you want me to come, when you brushed me off before.

  He sat at his desk and glared in her general direction. In a moment she appeared in a V-necked sweater and a gauzy Indian skirt, the kind sold in stores called Save Tibet. She didn’t look embarrassed, or disheveled, or in the least undone. He couldn’t fault her, except that she looked far too happy for such a murky November day. There she stood, radiant. Her eyes were shining. All that from Noah? Had the shaggy tree hugger really cast that kind of spell?

  “What is it?” Jess asked him.

  “Get back to work, please.”

  She smiled at him. He’d never asked her to do anything “please” before. She didn’t hear that he used the word only for emphasis. “Could I show Noah the Muir?”

  “Is he interested?” George spoke in the third person even as Noah materialized behind Jess.

  “Of course.” Then Jess saw that George meant “interested to buy,” and she looked a little disgusted. She liked to think of Yorick’s as some sort of rare-book room, a miniature Houghton or Beinecke.

  He unlocked the glass case, and Jess took out The Mountains of California.

  “Cool,” said Noah.

  “When I first enjoyed this superb view, one glowing April day,” Jess read aloud, “from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, the Central Valley, but little trampled or plowed as yet, was one furred, rich sheet of golden compositae, and the luminous wall of the mountains shone in all its glory. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light.”

  Golden compositae, George thought. How easy it was to forget the mountains, just a drive away.

  “And look at this.” Jess opened the book and showed Muir’s inscription on the flyleaf.

  Noah traced Muir’s signature with his fingertip. “That’s incredible.”

  “That’s fifteen hundred dollars.” George took John Muir away from Jess and locked him up again.

  Later, after Noah had to run off to work, Jess approached George at his desk. “Could I ask you something?”

  “You could.”

  “If you love books, why don’t you like sharing them with other people?”

  “I do like sharing them,” said George. “I like to exchange them for money, in a transaction economists call making a sale.”

  “You can hardly stand it when other people look at them.”

  “Looking is fine. I don’t enjoy watching people paw through a signed—”

  “You touch your books all the time,” Jess protested.

  “I wash my hands.” He had her there, and he saw her smile, despite herself.

  “You’re very supercilious,” she told him.

  You’re very pretty, he thought, but he said, “Anything else?”

  “Do you like owning books more than reading them?”

  He began to answer and then stopped. “You want me to admit that I like owning better, don’t you? Then you can tell me that books are about reading, and that words are free.”

  “No, I’m really asking,” she said. “Which do you like better—having or reading?”

  “I like reading books I own,” he said.

  “Does owning improve them?”

  “You mean why not go to the library? Look at this Gulliver’s Travels.” He unlocked the glass case again. “This is a 1735 printing. Do you see the ridges here?” He held up the page for her. “This is laid paper. See how beautiful it is?”

  “What happened there?” She was looking at the white scar on the back of his right hand.

  “Cooking accident,” he said.

  She couldn’t help staring at where the scar disappeared into his shirt cuff. “That must have been some knife.”

  “Look at this. Do you see the chapter headings?” He showed her the thick black type. “When I read Swift here, I’m reading him in this ink, on this paper, with this book in my hands—and I’m reading him as his contemporaries read him. You think there’s something materialistic about collecting books, but really collectors are the last romantics. We’re the only ones who still love books as objects.”

  “That’s the question,” said Jess. “How do you love them if you’re always selling them?”

  “I don’t sell everything,” he said. “You haven’t seen my own collection.”

  “What do you have?”

  “First editions. Yeats, Dickinson—all three volumes; Eliot, Pound, Millay …” He had noticed the books she read in the store. “Plath. I have Ariel—the English edition,” he added temptingly. “I also have Elizabeth Bishop.”

  “I wish I could see them,” Jess said.

  “You would have to come to my house.”

  “Are you inviting me?” She must have known this was a loaded question, but she asked without flirtatiousness or self-consciousness, as if to say, I only want to know as a point of information.

  Yes, he thought, I’m inviting you, but he did not say yes. He was her employer. She could act with a certain plucky independence, but he would always be the big bad wolf.

  “I have a theory about rare books,” Jess said. “Here’s what I think. Rare books—any books—start to die without readers. The words grow paler and paler.”

  “Not true,” George said. “Unread words don’t fade at all.”

  “I meant metaphorically,” said Jess.

  “You’d rather see them all in public libraries?”

  “Ideally, yes,” said Jess.

  “I’ve got a signed Harp-Weaver.”

  “Really!”

  He had to laugh. She was so eager.

  She saw that he was in a good mood, and took the opportunity to ask, “Could I put up a poster outside the door?”

  “No.”

  “Wait. You haven’t seen it.” She hurried to the storeroom where she kept her backpack and brought out a poster, which she unrolled over his desk. Comically, with hands and elbows, she tried to hold down all the corners at once. Failing in the attempt, she weighted them with George’s books: Gulliver’s Travels, The Good Earth, an old thesaurus.

  George saw a woodblock print redwood against a cloudless sky. One word in green:

  BREATHE

  “Sorry.” George pushed his books away. The poster rolled up instantly.

  “It’s a limited edition,” Jess said.

  “I don’t collect propaganda,” he told her.

  “How is the word breathe propaganda? You can’t object to breathing.”

  “I don’t object to breathing. I object to being told to breathe.”

  “There is no agenda here,” she said.

  “This is Save the Trees warning me that without redwoods I won’t breathe much longer. Therefore I should support the cause. I hope this is recycled paper, by the way.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “No posters anywhere near my store,” said George. “This is a poster- and leaflet-free zone.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said.

  “I’ll have to add that to my questionnaire: Are you now or have you ever been involved in an evangelical, Messianic, or environmental cult?”

  “Save the Trees is a registered nonprofit,” said Jess.

  “Oh, that’s all right then,” said George. “Yorick’s is a nonprofit too.”

  “And ‘Breathe’ is actually the title of a poem.”

  Breathe now.

  Breathe soon.

  Early and often.

  Between times

  Before it’s

  Too late.

  “Sorry.” George handed her the rolled-up poster. “No.”

  “You don’t like new poetry?” said Jess.

  “I don’t like bad poetry,” said George, and then with some horror, “You didn’t write that, did you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  “I used to write poetry
when I was younger,” Jess said. She had kept a notebook by her bed, in case some line or image came to her in her dreams, but she had always been a sound sleeper, and no Xanadus or nightingales woke her. She read Coleridge or Keats and felt that they had covered the great subjects so well that she had nothing to add about beauty, or immortality of the soul. “Now I just read.”

  She spoke cheerfully, without a hint of wistfulness. She was indignant sometimes, but never wistful. Opinionated, but still hopeful in her opinions. Oh, Jess, George thought, no one has hurt you yet.

  7

  Jess saw that George detested Noah, but she thought nothing of it. George disliked Noah because he disapproved of Noah’s cause, and George hated causes, unless they were his own. He seemed to think that other people’s efforts to change the world were doomed.

  Whenever the tree movement got bad press, George cut out the article for Jess. He was a regular clipping service, convinced that Save the Trees had ties to extremists who spiked redwoods with steel rods. He had no hard evidence, of course, but the news was full of loggers spooked and occasionally injured by some radical’s idea of altruism. “I suggest,” he told Jess on her last day before Thanksgiving break, “that you look at this discussion of possible links between Save the Trees and the incident in Humboldt County.”

  “No one at Save the Trees would support spiking,” Jess exclaimed, as she glanced at the article from the San Francisco Chronicle. “I’ve been volunteering for three months and I’ve never heard of anyone in favor of spiking.”

  “How about people in favor of bankrupting and maiming loggers?”

  “The loggers are exploited by Pacific Lumber,” Jess said. “They’re being used.”

  “So are you.”

  Someone else would have taken offense, but Jess wondered how George had become so sour. She reasoned that it had to do with being rich, that George had accrued so much that his life became one long struggle to conserve his property. How strange to live that way, like a snail, inside your own wealth.

  And yet she had a little money now and liked it. She owned one hundred shares of Veritech, the hottest stock ever. Jess often checked Veritech’s progress on her computer, where she loved to watch the stock price bob and float on the buoyant market. At first, watching made her feel guilty, but she quickly rationalized. The windfall wasn’t for herself, or her paltry bank account, or paying bills. She would give her stock to a great cause, or perhaps, if its value rose even higher, to several: the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and Greenpeace, as well as Save the Trees.