#library nerds

Today at work, I found Bucky Barnes favorite jams.

Staff Pick of the Week

My Staff Pick this week is a precious little thing called A Librarian's Cook Book; or, How to Keep Your Mind on Classifying, Cataloguing, and Doing Bibliographic Research and Yet Think of Food. Inspired by the excellent tasting menus @uispeccoll put together to help patrons explore their Szathmary Cookbook Collection, I went digging around our own collection to see what kinds of culinary gems we had hiding on our shelves. And I am oh-so-glad that I did.

Printed by Peacock Press in 1965, Liselotte F. Glozer’s A Librarian’s Cook Book is (in many ways) the opposite of what I generally want a cookbook to be. Firstly, there isn’t a single picture to be found in its pages. Secondly, I don’t particularly want to eat any of the 10 dishes it describes. Yet what this book lacks in culinary appeal, it makes up for in beautiful librarian nerdiness. From the table of contents (which includes each recipe’s Dewey and Library of Congress Classification), to the recipe descriptions (which include things like etymological or historical background information), citations to sources referenced during the writing process, and memos between the author and Head Science Cataloguer while trying to determine the classification of a particular recipe (see: Veal Birds, the 4th image provided above), I found this book to be 100% delightful. If you are a book lover or a person who appreciates library humor, I strongly encourage you to click through these images and give the descriptions a read.

 On a scale from one to ten, I rate it a big, dopey, closed-eye smile: