Collecting

I know no one who collects in the way that I do other than knitters and perhaps readers.  Is a personal library a collection or just an accident that happens as you find stuff you would like to read?

I do have a yarn collection.  You have all seen the signs of that.  I also have a small collection of blue and white china.  I've pictured that here before.  

I may have even shown you part of my other great collection before, but you are going to see it again!

I love to cook, but cooking is best done when you have time to gather things and prepare them thoughtfully with joy.  I am an indifferent cook of everyday foods.  I love cooking and over the years have amassed a large collection of cookbooks. 

    These are the hardcovers.  Many were bought long before I had a family or kids, long before cookbooks were works of photographic genius.  Cookbooks used to have very few photos, but were stuffed full of great things.  You just had to work harder, read and imagine deeper, that the very severe looking recipe would be magic.  

Over the years, I amassed these, but in the middle years, the years of kids and family and farming, there really wasn't a lot of money to spend on my interest in cookbooks.  But I could spend 10 bucks every now and then.  

I also needed recipes for things that I could make from what was readily available in the stores I shopped at.  In 1980, in small town Saskatchewan you weren't going to find the latest hot trend in cheese and rutabagas and parsnips would have been the trendiest vegetable out there. Baby Spinach?  Arugala?  I think not.

Jean Pare came out with 150 Delicious Squares in April of 1981 and her special brand of magic has been happening ever since.  She and the company that she founded to keep publishing are a Canadian success story.  She found her niche before there was such a thing as niche businesses.

I think I bought my first one, Muffins and More when it was published in 1983, and my sister in law bought me 150 Delicious Squares as a thank you gift for helping her out at Christmas function she was hosting.  I loved these books, and as Jean published her original series, I bought.  

The only one I don't have in the original format is the red Holiday Entertaining.  I have it in the format that it was given out at Turbo gas stations, a binder full of booklets.  But otherwise I have them all.  The whole shebang can be a little hard to take in all at once.  

Storage is always an issue.  Unfortunately, mine looks like this right now.

There are a few that aren't tucked in here, because it is full.  (The shelf below is cookbooks too)  

When we redid our kitchen, I told the designer lady that I needed a lot of room for my cookbooks.  She put in what she said would be lots, but there isn't even room on the pretty open shelves to show the whole Company's Coming collection!  There wasn't right from the very first.  Next kitchen I am going to make sure that the designer sees my collection of books before she talks me into something that isn't going to work!

I do have a number of the other Company's Coming books.  I did think about collecting them all at one point, but I had to knock some sense into my head.  Of all but the original series, I buy only what interests me.  I admit though, - how shall I put this - I am really interested! 

Anyway, as it happens, Company's Coming is still producing great cookbooks.  I don't buy them every time a new one comes out, but every once in a while I stock up and buy whatever titles I don't have.  

Now that some of the early ones are being republished and updated for modern tastes, I am not so sure I will keep up, but I am not sold on it.  A collection that is not complete is just a pile of books.

I have a spreadsheet to track what I have and what I don't have.  I find this pitiful, but there are so many.

Anyway my newest batch arrived yesterday.  I'm thrilled.  

If the knitting output goes down it is because I am reading a lot of good stuff!  

And maybe cooking.