[Sca-cooks] okay you have $7500.00 usd to build a library

[Johnna Holloway]

Why not take a look at my Tournaments Illuminated article
"The Essentials or Culinary Texts a Reader Must Know About"
Fall 2005 issue number 156?

Where would one start if one were really serious about such a project?
I'd suggest purchasing full runs of PPC and Gastronomica and Food 
History News
plus all the Oxford and Leeds Symposiums. That would be a quick $1000.
Then buy most of everything ever published by Prospect Books and
then decide which foreign language materials to buy. Forni editions come 
to mind.
The facsimile editions out of Germany. That might come pretty close to 
$7500.
Depends on who you have jobbing the order and what sort of discounts you are
seeking. The Greenwood Press titles are running $50-$55 each. There's 
probably
10 volumes there that would be needed. The Cagle bibliographies are $100 
each.
It all adds up. Plus there are OP editions like An Ordinance of Potage 
that can't be bought
for less than $139.00 these days.
I could probably spend $7500 in a matter of a week and have a reasonable 
collection
to show for it. Used books and antiquarian volumes might take some time 
as you have
to search those.

Ah but where to place such a collection?

Speaking as a librarian and as a collector of cookbooks and food history 
with almost twelve thousand volumes
collected over thirty plus years, I would never leave or place a 
collection with the SCA.
I would never donate a collection to an SCA kingdom because time again
I have watched resources lost or squandered or sold off for mere pennies
on the dollar or simply discarded. Archives and books just simply disappear.
No one is ever responsible and the volumes walk off. One starts looking 
for them
and learns that no one knows who had them last.


Anyone who was serious about developing such a collection would find an
academic library that would take and sign off on the collection. You 
want to have an attorney
draft the agreement so that the institution cannot accept and then sell 
the volumes at their next
used book sale. (Make sure they have to take the collection in full and 
catalogue it.) The institution
could then provide a place for the volumes to be used and see to their care.
And even see to interlibrary loan. Also it's far easier to get a gift 
appraised for
tax purposes if it's a donation to a library. And a collection in a 
library is taken care of
in terms of insurance and preservation.

There are notable culinary collections that might take such a collection.
MSU and the UM come to mind. Iowa is another.
See http://www.clements.umich.edu/culinary/index.html  for information on
the local Longone Collection here at the UM.
Or take a look at
A Selective Guide to Culinary Library Collections
in the United States
Madge Griswold, MA, CCP
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/madge/LibraryReport.pdf

Hope this helps,

Johnnae

JK Holloway. MSLIS






terry l. ridder wrote:
> hello;
>
> on a serious note;
>
> you have $7500.00 usd to build a library which will be
> donated to an sca kingdom for their library to be used
> in the culinary arts, the arts, and sciences explorations
> and research.
>
> what resources[1] would you purchase?
>
> [1] - resources == books, manuscripts, cdrom, dvd,
> bibliographies, etc.
>