The living room was stuffed with armchairs, end tables and bookcases, stacks of magazines and yellowed newspapers. Empty antique birdcages filled the front bay window. Abandoned pagodas. Flanking the dining table, open cabinets displayed bowls and goblets of dusty ruby-colored cut glass. A phalanx of botanical engravings adorned the walls. No bright tulips or orchids here. The engravings were all pale green and gray, portraying and anatomizing moss and lichens. Odd choices, George thought. Geoffrey purred, and instinctively, as he leaned over the green couch for a closer look, George touched the cat’s soft fur.
“He bites,” said Sandra.
Too late. George gasped as the cat nipped his finger.
“I warned you.” Sandra’s voice rose.
The wound looked like two pinpricks, the puncture marks of a tiny vampire.
“I told you. I said watch out for the cat. He’s a very …”
She disappeared into the next room, and George followed her into a kitchen that smelled of bananas and wheat germ and rotting plums. The paint on the cabinets was chipped, the countertops stacked with dishes and small New Age appliances: rice cooker, yogurt maker, fruit dehydrator. Little cacti lined the windowsills. Prickly cacti, hairy cacti; spiky, round, bulbous, hostile little plants of every kind.
“He was my uncle’s cat,” Sandra explained. “He was abused when he was younger. My uncle found him and took him in, and then when my uncle passed …”
Ignoring this sob story, George marched to the sink.
“He felt abandoned,” Sandra said.
George turned on the tap and a cloud of fruit flies rose from the drain. Disgusted, he held his finger under the running water.
“Let me get you some iodine,” said Sandra. “Let me …” Her voice trailed off again. “You do still want to see the books?”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
She had turned her back to open the kitchen cabinets. For a moment he thought she was searching for the iodine, and then he saw them. Leather-bound, cloth-bound, quartos and folios, books of every size. The cabinets were stacked with books. Not a dish or cup in sight. Only books. Sandra bent and opened the lower cabinets. Not a single pot or pan. Just books. She stood on a chair to reach the cabinet above the refrigerator. Books there as well.
George stepped away from the sink without noticing that he had left the water running. Injury forgotten, he gazed in awe. He leaned against the counter and stared at bindings of hooped leather, red morocco, black and gold. Sandra opened a drawer, and there lay Le Livre de Cuisine. She opened the drawer below and he took out The Accomplisht Cook: or, The Art and Mystery of Cookery. He opened the book at random: Section XIII: The First Section for dressing of fish, Shewing divers ways, and the most excellent, for dressing Carps, either Boiled, Stewed, Broiled, Roasted, or Baked, &c. He had never tried to roast a carp. Take a live carp, draw and wash it, and take away the gall, and milt, or spawn; then make a pudding with some grated manchet, some almond-paste, cream, currans, grated nutmeg, raw yolks of eggs, sugar, caraway-seed candied, or any peel, some lemon and salt, then make a stiff pudding and … The cook in him wanted to read on, but the collector was distracted by the array in cabinets beneath, above, below.
Where should he begin? How could he approach, let alone assess a trove like this? Books like these would take a specialist, a Lowenstein or Wheaton. The sheer numbers were overwhelming. The antiquity. And the strangeness of it all, the perversity of substituting cookbooks for utensils, domestic treatises for pots and pans, words for cups, recipes for spoons and spatulas and cutlery. Still cradling The Accomplisht Cook, George tried to comprehend the open cabinets and drawers before him. He did not make a sound until Sandra opened the oven. Then a cry escaped. Books piled even here, arrayed in boxes on cookie sheets! The collector had converted oven racks to stacks.
“Where did he find these?” George murmured to Sandra.
She shook her head. “After the War,” she said, “when he was young. But he kept them in boxes until he retired, and then slowly he unpacked them, and shelved them here. He didn’t cook.”
George knelt before the open oven. He slid the top rack out partway and took a flat box in his two hands, keeping it level, as one might support a cake. “Oh, my God,” he murmured. Inside the box lay La Cuisine Classique, volume two, bound in worn red morocco.
He opened the book, and scraps of paper fluttered to the floor.
“What’s this?”
The book was stuffed with folded notebook paper, even index cards, the precious volume interleaved with notes. George looked up at Sandra in alarm. “These aren’t acid-free. You see this?” He held up a note card covered with black writing. “The acid in this card will eat your book alive. This has to go.”
Notes and even newspaper clippings. The nineteenth-century volume was stuffed with what looked like shopping lists and pages torn from address books, thin typing paper brittle with age. Black ink leached onto the title page.
“You don’t keep folios like this,” he told Sandra. “Not in ovens! Look at this.” The collector’s block printing stained recipes for aspic, and smudged an engraved illustration of eight desserts, including pralinées aux fruit and abricots à la Portugaise. What had the man been thinking? Notes in permanent black ink pressed between these pages? He pulled out a folded article from The New York Times. An obituary for Samuel Chamberlain.
“He asked me to keep everything,” Sandra said.
George wasn’t listening. “Do you see this? A paper clip!” The silver wire clipped several scraps of paper to a recipe for petites meringues à l’ananas. George pulled it off, and showed Sandra the rusty impression left behind. “This is criminal.”
The paper clip upset him most of all. And there were others. A rare cookbook with lavish illustrations required lavish care. What George saw here were pages stained and crimped. “Have you opened these?” George demanded.
She shook her head.
“Have you seen their condition?”
“I try not to … I don’t want to crack the bindings,” she said.
He did not believe her. Who could resist cracking books like these? He wanted to open them right now, one after another on the kitchen table. He wanted to shuck these books like oysters in their shells.
“He asked me to keep the collection together,” she said.
George caressed a quarto bound in brown leather, hooped at the spine, secured with a gold clasp curiously wrought with scalloped, spiraling designs, engraved initials CWM, and the date 1735. Inside the book a title page printed in prickly gothic letters: Das Brandenburgiche Koch-Buch. Oh, glorious. The frontispiece depicted men and maidservants dressing fowl, and roasting meat over a roaring fire. Through a stone archway the lady of the house watched over all, raising her right index finger to instruct the staff. She held a great key in her other hand. The key to the house? To the spices? To cookery itself? In a reverie, George turned the page—and discovered folded typing paper.
He exploded. “You cannot stuff a book like this. Do you understand?”
“These are my uncle’s notes.”
“He was not a scholar,” George said, for he could not imagine a scholar imposing his notes on books like these.
“Yes, he was. He was a lichenologist.” She watched as George unfolded the brittle piece of typing paper. “He was very well known—in his field,” she added anxiously. “His name was Tom McClintock. He held the Bancroft Chair in …”