Unusual cookery books can be a recipe for mild obsession. WoMer and Taste of London festival fringe tweeter Catherine Phipps, aka Catlily, talks shop with the experts. What’s your greatest pleasure when it comes to cookery books and food writing?

I have two obsessions in life: books and food. Put the two together and I’m in heaven (and here amongst fellow Word of Mouthers I know I’m not alone!). I trawl cookery books for inspiration and love being carried off to far-flung times and places. One minute I’m barefoot in the rainforest, transported by the scent of exotic spices, the next I’m immersed in the nineteenth century when suet was king and the poor feasted on oysters.

I devote hours to seeking out undiscovered titles both old and new, but I am selective. I don’t want something generic or an untested slebchef glossy, and I care about the quality of the writing. I get almost as much pleasure from Fergus Henderson’s gentle wit as I do from his recipes; I reach more often for Jane Grigson than Elizabeth David, because I find in the former a motherly instructor who always tells you why, and in the latter a hectoring and prescriptive personality.

Seeking the books out is all part of the fun and is made all the better if you find a bookseller who knows their stuff, loves the subject matter and is prepared to impart their enthusiasm to their customers. I found this singular combination in two people last weekend at Taste of London. Being the cookery book junkie that I am it was no great trauma to drag myself away from the tasting frenzy to spend an hour or so talking about the business of book selling with Jonathan Tootell, a rare and secondhand cookery book specialist, and the manager of the cookery book department at Foyles, Veronica Leek.

I was interested to know what people buy and how that influences their stock. As this was Taste, the books Jonathan had brought along were quite chef-centric – Richard Olney’s Simple French Food and Anthony Blake’s Great Chefs of France are unsurprisingly sought after, but it was a delight to hear that one of my own personal favourites, Lindsey Bareham, is popular, particularly for her Big Red Book of Tomatoes. More off the wall are the crime/food books of Nicholas Freeling, who apparently inspired Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential”. Having read the latter, I’m not altogether sure whether this is a good thing.

It seems that many of Jonathan’s less cheffy customers have similar tastes to mine – they want to browse quirky, amusing titles as well as find that elusive, out of print title. I’ll buy a book purely on the strength of the title, such as Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s A Guide for the Greedy by a Greedy Woman, a collection of writings from the late 19th century.

I was recently entranced by the ferocious sounding Beatrice Clay (House Matron and Home Ec lecturer, Glossop) who divides her foods into “nitrogenous” and “non nitrogenous”, has “wet” and “dry” cooking methods for meat, and who under the beverage section gives this exhortation: “My advice to you about alcohol is: Leave it alone. O God, that men should put an enemy into their mouths To steal away their brains.” This type of book is bedtime reading and doesn’t often make it into the kitchen, but many others I possess are food splattered.

I asked Jonathan about this, and he said that splatterings will devalue a book but annotations won’t. I was pleased about this, as one of the delights of looking in old books is to find the handwritten amendments, complaints (“Beware! Doesn’t work!”), and recipes cut out from other sources.

One way I differ from some of Jonathan’s clients is that I care more about the words in the book than the book itself – some collectors objectify the books. His strangest example of this came when he was invited to someone’s house to value their collection – 2000 pristine, untouched books on cookery and a kitchen which had never been used beyond making the odd cup of tea.

Jonathan has a concession at Foyles, which means that they still have a stock of secondhand books alongside the new – a system popular with many independents (such as the wonderful Books For Cooks) and one I heartily agree with. I tend to avoid the major chains unless I want something very new and mainstream which is being discounted, but I’m thinking of revisiting Foyles in particular, as they assure me that they try to keep everything that’s in print, and see much value in holding titles which fill out their collection even if they don’t expect to sell more than the occasional copy (the example they gave me was Constance Spry; the value of having her books on the shelves is that discerning and knowledgeable customers expect to see them).

I found the whole buying policy intriguing, because the booksellers have to be clued in enough to spot trends (the reasons for an emerging trend are often obvious, but sometime they come out of nowhere, such as the recent craze for canapés) and listen to their customers enough to know what will sell. This means taking risks at times. Veronica Leek told me was that she sometimes takes books on spec from self-published authors, because her instinct tells her it will sell. These sometimes attract publishing deals, so would-be food writers, take heart!

As I said above, knowing the WoM crowd I’m sure I’m not alone in my obsessions. What is your greatest pleasure when it comes to cookery books and food writing? And where do you go to feed your habit? Do the virtual shelves of the internet and the pile ‘em high displays on the high street fulfil your needs, or are you frustrated by the what’s on offer? Perhaps you regularly haunt a certain second hand bookshop – if you can bear to reveal your sources, then please tell us.