When life gives you cookbooks, start a digital archive

Hey all, got quite a tale to tell this week! I'm going to have to try to tell it quickly, because I'm getting a late start on the newsletter, but you'll see why it was worth throwing out my schedule this week. First, an announcement:

• We're going to be holding a screenprinting day down at the Artisan Market workshop on Saturday, August 28th. Exact times TBD. We'll be printing the Montague Commoners logo onto blank Tshirts we've thrifted, and onto any other flat-ish fabric objects people want to bring in! We can print onto tote bags, tshirts, sweatshirts, and more. I doubt there's anyone out there who wants Montague Commoners pillowcases, but if I'm wrong we can make that happen 🤣 It's a great chance to see how screenprinting works close up, and everyone who helps out for an hour or more will be able to take home a free tshirt of their choice.

So, these cookbooks...

My next door neighbor passed away a few months ago, and her estate sale was held this past weekend. The Friends of the Montague Library found out that she had an enormous cookbook collection, and that the books that didn't sell were all going to be thrown in a dumpster at the end of the sale. The Friends asked if they could have them, but the estate sale folks were non-committal. I heard about all this at the Saturday market, so after the market closed, I went over to check out the sale.

When I saw the table of cookbooks in the garage, I thought "Yeah, that's a decent number of cookbooks."

When I saw the bookcases full of cookbooks in the kitchen, I thought "Oh, that's what they meant by a lot of cookbooks."

By the time I found the 5th room full of cookbooks in the basement, I had stopped being surprised 😄

There were THOUSANDS of cookbooks. Many of them were commercially published, but a significant number of them were produced by church and community groups. It was a common fundraising practice for much of the 20th century, and Sandy had managed to collect these books from groups all over the country across 4+ decades.

I've hung out with way too many sociologists and historians over the years to let a goldmine like this end up in a dumpster. For all we know, some of these could be the last surviving copy of some of these cookbooks.

So I left my contact info with the estate sale folks, emphasizing that I lived right next door, I was willing to do the work of boxing up the books, and we could stick them in my living room if push came to shove.

Then came the hard part...

On Monday, I got a call from the owner of the clean-up company saying that his crew was going to be at the house in half an hour, and I could come get the books if I wanted to.

I jumped on my bike and rode down to City Hall to ask Kelly to send out the Friends of the Library bat signal, then raced back home to grab all them empty bankers boxes I could find.

(Sidenote: Nate and I did our move out from Colorado using bankers boxes, and I highly recommend it. They can be assembled and closed without tape, and if you find something that needs to go in an "already packed" box, you can just take the lid off and add the new item. Plus, having all your boxes be the same size makes packing the truck/pod/etc a LOT simpler. We're still unpacking the occasional box from the move, and it goes against my nature to recycle a good bankers box, so we had a fair number hanging around.)

At the start, there was no sense of how long we were going to have to pack the books. So I spent most of Monday packing boxes as quickly as I could and carrying them out to the curb. When the cleaners needed to close up at 3, I'd pulled out 16+ boxes of books, and I hadn't even made it past the kitchen 😅 Luckily, it was clear that it was going to be a multi-day project for the cleaning crew as well, so we made plans for another push the next day.

Day 2 we had half a dozen or so volunteers, and things went a lot faster. I had the youngest knees of those present, so I focused on bringing packed boxes up from the basement and out to people's cars. We were able to get all the remaining books packed up, and maybe half of them off to temporary storage in various people's garages. The rest, we brought up into the kitchen so that we could load them up as easily as possible the next day.

Day 3 was fairly short. We were able to fit the remaining boxes into two cars, and they headed off to storage.

Since then, I've been researching possible next steps. Ideally, I'd love to digitize the collection locally so that we can make it available to the local community. It turns out that the new director of the library district got her degree in archival studies, and she thinks we might be able to get a grant to help us out. The Friends of the Library are on board with the idea, but we've still got a lot of logistics to figure out. If you'd be interested in helping with this project, let me know!

I've also been seeing if I can find an established archive that would be interested in preserving the collection. I've exchanged a few emails with the Internet Archive, and it's looking promising. They normally stick to traditionally published books, but they agree that it sounds like a valuable historical resource. I'm also going to keep looking for academic archives that might be interested. I want to get a local copy for our local community, but to really preserve them properly we need to get them somewhere future researchers will actually be able to find them.

I'll share more updates as the project develops. The next step is going to be sorting the community cookbooks from the mass-produced ones, and I should be able to get better photos of some of the cool ones along the way.

Recommendation Corner

This week's recommendation is a twofer, because I think these two books pair really well with each other. Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas is a fantastic explanation of the ways that the richest Americans convince themselves that they're doing good in the world, while actually entrenching their own power and preventing real change. I've seen a lot of committed movement organizers driven into burnout by the demands of the nonprofit industrial complex, and this was the book that helped me understand why the system was broken in the way that it was. I highly recommend it to anyone who's ever been frustrated by a counterproductive non-profit job.

Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò looks at a very similar pattern that plays out in the ideological sphere. He focuses on the concept of "identity politics", from its original elaboration by the Combahee River Collective, to the strawmen created by reactionaries in the media, to the cardboard imitations promoted in corporate trainings.

Both of these books are great on their own, but by combining their viewpoints, we can get a really good picture of why it's so hard to make progress on common sense social justice issues. I read each of them when they were initially published, and they've been bouncing around in my brain ever since. I frequently see examples of the patterns they describe, and avoiding the traps they outline is a big part of why I organize the way I do.

This week's nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, so that means you get to see this week's nails! No particular reason for the polish choices this week, I just saw them both on the shelf and thought they might look interesting together.

Have a good week out there, and try not to melt in the heat. If I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.

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