As noted in previous posts, one of the best ways to achieve some sense of completion with regard to your private library is to use mini collections as its building blocks. While the main collection, e.g. Food & Drink, may never be completed (due to the sheer number of titles published), the mini collections that comprise your main collection can be completed if each such mini collection is small enough.
As we saw in yesterday's post, the higher levels within your main collection may have seen so many titles published that they can be stand-alone collections in their own right, so the key to achieving a sense of completeness is to focus on increasingly smaller mini collections. With respect to cookbooks, one of the most popular building blocks for a private library of books about Food & Drink, such an increasingly refined focus might look like this:
- Food & Drink > Cooking > Cookbooks > Regional Cookbooks > French Cookbooks
Or like this:
- Food & Drink > Cooking > Cookbooks > Regional Cookbooks > European Cookbooks > European Cookbooks Published Before 1700
The important thing is to keep refining your focus until you reach a level that is small enough that you can reasonably expect to complete a specific level given your time and financial resources. And this is where, again, a good bibliography can save you a lot of grief. The second of the above options, for example, may look like it would be easier to complete. But it almost certainly would require the expenditure of substantially more money than the first option. And the number of titles required to achieve completion, while likely to be fewer than those required to complete the first mini collection, would still would be daunting. (According to Henry Notaker's Printed Cookbooks in Europe, 1470-1700, "[m]ore than a hundred titles in at least 650 editions were printed in fourteen different languages:")
Apicius, De re Coquinaria, 1709 (an 18th century edition of the earliest known surviving cookbook in codex form)
More importantly, perhaps, the titles required to complete the second of the above mini collections are not likely to be found at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library sales and the like, while titles required to complete the first mini collection might very well be found at such sales.
Tomorrow, we will extend this concept to another subject for which mini collections are the solution to achieving some sense of completion....
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