NYU's Fales Library recently acquired 21,000 books on food and cooking, and now has one of the largest collections of culinary texts in the country. But the now-famous library wasn't always a mecca for food academics: NYU's Food Studies program, the first in the country, began in 1996 without a strong base of resources. The university's stock of food documents has grown enormously since then.
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"Many people had been collecting cookbooks because libraries refused to carry them," Marion Nestle, a nutrition expert and Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies and public health said. "As these people grew older, they needed to divest their collections. That's how the Fales collection got started."
Marvin Taylor, the curator of Fales, was interested in creating such a collection of texts. Cecily Brownstone, a food writer for the Associated Press for 40 years, began by donating a collection of 12,000 books and 5,000 pamphlets. Over the years, others have donated collections, bringing the total to 55,000 unique works.
"These are in constant use by scholars in every imaginable field and are an extraordinary resource for our students," Nestle said.
The recent donation made by George and Jennifer Lang of Cafe des Artistes in the Upper West Side joins a collection of other culinary books with ethnic or regional food — some of them quite unusual.
But is the historical specificity of some rather bizarre documents — not just their focus on food — that makes the Fales collection so unique.
"Some books that I find interesting are the spiral-bound community cookbooks from churches and synagogues," said Esti Brennan, a second-year English Master's student who works at Fales. "The material can be about random things like the favorite dishes of 11th graders from Baton Rouge, and a lot of them are special because they aren't mass published."
The collection documents foods that highlight not only New York City, but also other regions of the world. It boasts a total of 200,000 volumes of rare books and manuscripts of English and American literature, other general special collections of the NYU libraries and the Downtown Collection, which archives downtown New York art, performance and literary scenes from the 1970s to the present day.
Just a small part of the Fales collection is open to the public, and students must look through much of the material in the library's reading room because most of the works are non-circulating.
Food studies freshman Lily Chin visits Fales when she needs to write research papers.
"A lot of our books come from the eighth floor where they can be borrowed," she said. "But a good number of culture and history books in Fales can be essential for classes about society and food, so they are necessary for research papers."
