The Best Thing About Food Blogs
Or one of the best things, anyway. They’re not on paper.
Result: not so many dead wild trees; fewer monocrop tree plantations, reduced use of horrendous paper-processing chemicals. To say nothing of less giant log truck exhaust.
- Ok, these are safe. The wood lot on the other side of the road, not so much.
In other words, I’ve been cleaning out a few bookcases, bookcases that haven’t been cleaned out for quite a while. In addition to books, photographs and assorted memorabilia, they contained folders that I’d been thinking were full of old manuscripts but were in fact full of self-published food newsletters.
Tons – well, many pounds – of food newsletters. Newsletters beyond counting, from gifted writers and the prose-challenged, from good cooks and from people who should not be allowed near kitchens except in restaurants.
Old copies of keepers like The Art of Eating, Simple Cooking and Food History News will go to the Cushing library (which may be the very last library on earth willing to accept such things). The rest – into the recycle bin, with gratitude that there is finally something reasonably benign to do with unwanted paper.
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Funny, I’m cleaning out too. Late spring cleaning? Great feeling dumping whole files.
So glad to hear about the Cushing library. I’ll check in with them, but not before they’ve taken your stuff!
Recently I’ve tried to sell a few old books. The Strand offered me $5 to a two-volume set on English folklore printed in 1847 and in good condition. My friend has a huge number of signed 1st editions of fiction that she can’t sell. Sad that wonderful old books no longer seem to have any monetary (or cultural) value.
I’ll always love books but dragging about 10 lbs of guidebooks to the UK this summer does makes me start dreaming of a Kindle…
Ah, as I head off in a while to Bloomsday on Broadway (for it is June 16), my hefty copy of Ulysses in hand, you remind me again of this conundrum. A Kindle, for example, is certainly a paper-saving convenience, and I have succumbed to it, including for my subscription to the NY Times (you, Leslie, are in fact the one who started me thinking about all that newspaper, and then, well, there was the long cold winter walk down the driveway . . .). I do worry/hope there will always be a place for the real deal, as in real books. Anne Carson’s Nox, for example, would just not work on the Kindle. (Go to http://rainingacorns.blogspot.com/2010/06/anne-carsons-nox.html to see why.)