While many of you come here for the recipe reviews and occasional anecdotes about other aspects of my life, sometimes I like to switch things up. One of the things I’ve only touched upon slightly is my affinity for the printed word. I’m lucky enough to work in a local public library where I get to be surrounded by books, this is especially true since I work in the cataloging department. It’s my job to get the books ready for the shelf and the public. So you may be confused by the title of this post. “If he works in a library, why does he want his own library of cookbook?” Well, honestly there are a few reasons. But the main one is simple: I enjoy having them.

Recently I decided to restart my personal collection of cookbooks. Actually, it never really stopped. Though the number of books I bought each year has dwindled quite a bit. This post is NOT going to be a personal library history Tedx Talk, so I won’t go into too much further detail. But after a few years of swearing off the purchase of books of any kind (with the exception of some authors that I truly enjoy such as Ina Garten and Ree Drummond), I’ve been having a strong desire to build my own personal library once again.

So I did.

Thanks to sites such as ThriftBooks, which sells used books for a fraction of the cost, I’ve been able to rebuild the collection without breaking the bank. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that cookbooks can be some of the more expensive items in a bookstore, mostly thanks to their compulsory color photography and high-gloss pages.

Over the next few weeks (or months), I’ll be sharing some of the cookbooks that I’ve recently added to my collection. But for now, I’m going to refer you back to some very, very early posts from this website where I talked about some of the books I owned at the time.

Ina Garten Cookbook reviews (some of them!)

Vegetarian/Plant-Based Cookbooks

Mediterranean Diet Cookbook

Until next time, readers!