For about thirty years I have been collecting Manufacturers’ Recipe and Advertisement Cookbook Pamphlets at antique malls from St. Louis to Baltimore and Columbia to St. Louis when we moved here. Last December I donated the collection of 600 of them to the Irwin Rare Books Library at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. I am now not only the donor, but the curator of the collection.
For about thirty years I have been collecting Manufacturers’ Recipe and Advertisement Cookbook Pamphlets at antique malls from St. Louis to Baltimore and Columbia to St. Louis when we moved here. Last December I donated the collection of 600 of them to the Irwin Rare Books Library at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. I am now not only the donor, but the curator of the collection. It is called the Jerred Metz Manufacturers’ Recipe and Advertisement Cookbook Pamphlets Collection.
Library staff are scanning all the covers and contents I have designated—text and illustrations. There what is called a metadata base being developed. This will take at least a year to finish. I will occasionally write about the collection. There will be scholars and students attracted to it, and I might do some teaching about the industrialization of food in America.
I will lecture on the collection next spring at the library. There will be an exhibit of some of the booklets. I don’t yet know the date, but I will notify people when the date is set. It should be worth a trip to Columbia.
Many years ago I wrote about some of the items. When I finish writing The Crowning Battle of the Great War and the next novel, a comic novel about Gracie Allen’s run for the presidency in 1940, I will devote my writing and research to the collection.
If you have any of these recipe pamphlets I would like to know about them. People are welcome to add to the collection. I would need to see them first, since I want to add only items that are not already in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dole_Food_Company