The dust of second-hand books must have preservative powers. When I last met KKS Murthy, the owner of Bengaluru’s Select Books, who recently passed away aged 95, it was after a gap of many years. He seemed quite unchanged, sitting amid the heaps of books in his now 80-year-old shop off Brigade Road. He recognised me at once and, without asking, directed me to a pile of second-hand cookbooks.
I rarely buy physical books now. You can tell me all about the joys of holding a printed book, and I’ll shrug and switch on the e-books app on my tablet or phone, with instant access to thousands of books, new ones instantly available, all easily searchable, with adjustable lighting and size. I also live in a humid Goa valley, which is rotting my old books.
But I still love second-hand books. Booksellers like Murthy who specialise in them are rare now, with the places where they congregated — Fort’s pavements in Mumbai, Moore Market in Chennai —mostly cleared away. New & Secondhand, in Mumbai’s Dhobi Talao, is a distant memory. But Murthy kept the flag flying for the kind of place where, instead of the purposive searching of regular bookshops, you could randomly sift through piles and find the one book which, through past owners and shops, was waiting for you.
The Australian chef Ben Shewry describes this in his memoir Uses for Obsession. He was in a second-hand bookshop in the late 1990s, an era defined by American chefs turning expensive ingredients into sculpted works of art. The books reflected this, beautiful and boring, until he found a plain paperback of David Thompson’s Classic Thai Cuisine. It seemed to say, he recalled, “I have selected you, not the other way around. I will not beguile you with fancy imagery. Instead, I will reward you with depth and revelation not contained elsewhere.”
Second-hand cookbooks often show heavy signs of use, reminding us that they are kitchen tools. Julia Child always preferred signing such stained, dog-eared, spine-cracked copies of her books on French cooking; it showed they were truly valued. Nicola Humble, in Culinary Pleasures, her history of cookbooks, mischievously suggests that these physical traces are what distinguish them from other books “except perhaps the erotic novel that falls open automatically at its most purple passages”.
The other sign that cookbooks are meant for practical use is that people readily write in them. Older books were often interspersed with blank pages specifically for this purpose. “Cook books become palimpsests, the original text overlaid with personal meanings and experiences,” writes Humble. Even removals can be revealing, like the whole section on the manage me of servants she finds ripped from a 1920s book “the action of someone who has lost all hope of being able to afford or find servants ever again”.
Writings in cookbooks enhances the originals. Mrs. GL Routleff’s Economical Cookery Book for India (1942) was already one of the best British Raj-era cookbooks, but my copy was made better by Mrs. CP Dhayananthan who wrote her name on the new copy she bought in New Delhi on ‘5/5/45’. Alongside Mrs. Routleff’s Raj classics, Mrs. Dhayananthan has added her proportions for ‘savoury potato murukkus’ and eggless cakes made with condensed milk. The latter is a good example of how old recipes, devised for times when ingredients like eggs were scarce, can find new use for vegan bakers today.
I admit to some hypocrisy here. If cookbook users like me don’t buy and write in physical books these days, where will future secondhand supplies come from? Perhaps the loss is less because today’s cookbook scribblers are writing blogs and sub stacks, making their notes widely available. This is also more permanent than cookbooks, which were often printed on low-quality paper. But crumbling as they are, I still value my scribbled in second-hand cookbooks and mourn the loss of the booksellers like Murthy who sold them to me.
I rarely buy physical books now. You can tell me all about the joys of holding a printed book, and I’ll shrug and switch on the e-books app on my tablet or phone, with instant access to thousands of books, new ones instantly available, all easily searchable, with adjustable lighting and size. I also live in a humid Goa valley, which is rotting my old books.
But I still love second-hand books. Booksellers like Murthy who specialise in them are rare now, with the places where they congregated — Fort’s pavements in Mumbai, Moore Market in Chennai —mostly cleared away. New & Secondhand, in Mumbai’s Dhobi Talao, is a distant memory. But Murthy kept the flag flying for the kind of place where, instead of the purposive searching of regular bookshops, you could randomly sift through piles and find the one book which, through past owners and shops, was waiting for you.
The Australian chef Ben Shewry describes this in his memoir Uses for Obsession. He was in a second-hand bookshop in the late 1990s, an era defined by American chefs turning expensive ingredients into sculpted works of art. The books reflected this, beautiful and boring, until he found a plain paperback of David Thompson’s Classic Thai Cuisine. It seemed to say, he recalled, “I have selected you, not the other way around. I will not beguile you with fancy imagery. Instead, I will reward you with depth and revelation not contained elsewhere.”
Second-hand cookbooks often show heavy signs of use, reminding us that they are kitchen tools. Julia Child always preferred signing such stained, dog-eared, spine-cracked copies of her books on French cooking; it showed they were truly valued. Nicola Humble, in Culinary Pleasures, her history of cookbooks, mischievously suggests that these physical traces are what distinguish them from other books “except perhaps the erotic novel that falls open automatically at its most purple passages”.
The other sign that cookbooks are meant for practical use is that people readily write in them. Older books were often interspersed with blank pages specifically for this purpose. “Cook books become palimpsests, the original text overlaid with personal meanings and experiences,” writes Humble. Even removals can be revealing, like the whole section on the manage me of servants she finds ripped from a 1920s book “the action of someone who has lost all hope of being able to afford or find servants ever again”.
Writings in cookbooks enhances the originals. Mrs. GL Routleff’s Economical Cookery Book for India (1942) was already one of the best British Raj-era cookbooks, but my copy was made better by Mrs. CP Dhayananthan who wrote her name on the new copy she bought in New Delhi on ‘5/5/45’. Alongside Mrs. Routleff’s Raj classics, Mrs. Dhayananthan has added her proportions for ‘savoury potato murukkus’ and eggless cakes made with condensed milk. The latter is a good example of how old recipes, devised for times when ingredients like eggs were scarce, can find new use for vegan bakers today.
I admit to some hypocrisy here. If cookbook users like me don’t buy and write in physical books these days, where will future secondhand supplies come from? Perhaps the loss is less because today’s cookbook scribblers are writing blogs and sub stacks, making their notes widely available. This is also more permanent than cookbooks, which were often printed on low-quality paper. But crumbling as they are, I still value my scribbled in second-hand cookbooks and mourn the loss of the booksellers like Murthy who sold them to me.
