Help! There’s a cookbook in my refrigerator!

Does this say something about the congested conditions in my kitchen library?

At this moment Julia Child snuggles against Craig Claiborne (a ticklish situation at best: neither cared much for the other), and Martha Stewart is buried under Fanny Farmer (and we all know it should be the other way around.) Tattered and torn “Recipes from Old Virginia” (my very first cookbook) is all but hidden on the fourth and uppermost shelf where it is impossible to stretch, reach and fetch it. No matter how many times I make Port Wine Jelly (for the ailing and almost-ailing) found on page 152 of this 1946 gem, I always forget the ratio of gelatin to sugar.

And what of the cookbook growing colder by the cottage cheese and applesauce?

It is there to remind me to bake Scottish shortbread while unsalted butter remains intact.

And it is there to urge me to clear off a holding place for this, one of my favorite of the family cookbooks.

What is a read-a-maniac to do?

Overstuffed kitchen shelves are not the only spot in the house where there is a problem. Our den contains so many volumes that I have begun double-shelving, putting newer books in front of old. While I cannot bring myself to pitch Astronomy for Everyone, c. 1900, it does not deserve to be front and center on the academic ledge.

Will anyone in this household ever read the complete Sherlock Holmes?

Ditto Alfred Hitchcock? Or Sherwood Anderson? I seriously doubt it. But still, it is a shame to let these folios go.

I may never travel as extensively as I once did, but guides to the Louvre, Prado and the castles of Prague hold great memories that I could never toss onto the book heap.

I browsed every book shelf in our home recently, collecting novels and non-fiction to donate to a worthy book sale forthcoming. I tried to prioritize, confirming only to myself that there are some books that cannot be pitched no matter how noble the causes.

For example, the classics by strong Southern female writers: Lee Smith’s “Fair and Tender Ladies,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mocking-bird,” Kaye Gibbons’ “Ellen Foster,” and of course the mother of them all, Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind.” These are treasured old friends, dog-eared from reading and re-reading over the decades.

And then there is my collection on the British Isles. Being a hopeless Anglophile I love every one and cannot bear to see any go out the door. Recent personal favorites are by Susan Toth, whose love affair with England began around the same time as my own.

I realize that there are newer and classier editions of “Wuthering Heights,” “Middlemarch,” “Emma” and “Pride and Prejudice.” But my copies mean something personal to me that newer paper and shinier covers could never convey.

Valuable to me are books personalized by various authors I have come to know, however slightly. Adriana Trigiani’s trilogy is a keeper, as is Nikki Giovanni’s latest work and a few delightful tomes by Virginia’s granddaddy of fine literature, George Garrett. I have one copy of each of Carrie Brown’s five wonderful books.

They are neatly arranged in chronological order, begging to be plucked out and reread, which I do in admiration and awe.

This is daunting, a close to impossible chore, that of eliminating books. But before the shelves buckle under pressure and spill their contents upon both spouse and dog...pick and choose I shall.
And each volume that goes out will take a bit of my heart along with it.

Author Barbara Dickinson lives in the Roanoke Valley.

Comments or questions? E-mail to comments@primeliving.net.