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My books come right into the kitchen with me.  Sometimes, however, if the recipe crosses several pages, I use a photocopy for ease of flipping back and forth. The cookbooks in my house are all part of the cooking process, from the cruising the book, shall-I-make-this-stage? or the results of an EYB search because I've got a harvest of leeks from the garden stage.  Eventually reaching the I'm-gonna-make-this-stage - we're in it together.

After many years of maintaining my cookbooks in pristine condition, I have developed the habit of making notes (without guilt) on the page in pencil, and thoroughly enjoy/appreciate encountering them when revisiting that particular recipe.

I love it when a book flips open automatically to a well-loved, often prepared dish; I might not love the splashes and stains, but I really don't much mind them.  Notwithstanding, I do try to be careful with the books when they're in the kitchen and don't place them needlessly at risk, but sometimes splashes happen.

Many people utilize their books as inspiration rather than the actual recipes.  The books and I?  We're a team.

Obviously, there's no right or wrong way to approach the cookbooks in your collection - how do you use yours?

Most of the cookbooks I use live in the kitchen, on shelves at the far end from the cooking corner.  No stand here, either; in use, a cookbook sits out on the kitchen table -- away from the work surfaces, but near enough to step over and have a look.  I've gotten particularly vigilant about this since joining EYB, because I'm so often trying out things from a library book.

My kitchen journal is open beside it, for making notes during and afterwards. There may already be notes there from other similar recipes, since I often synthesize from several sources before undertaking a new dish. 

If a dish is particularly successful, particularly if it deviates from the cookbook's version, I'll type it up and print it for the 'favorites' recipe binder.  I'm way behind on doing that, so most of the successes of the last few months are in scribbled notes that get less readable by the day...  It would be worth the effort to  transcribe them, though, because most of my notes are about sequence of prep and execution, or how long a particular step takes, or ingredients I subbed/added. 

Usually there's more to take note of than I'd like to pencil in to the cookbook, even if I were to get in the habit of doing that. However, I treasure my mother's notes in the Joy of Cooking and Julia, and take her advice on revised ingredient amounts.

Moved into the kitchen to take a look at the dust-jacket situation.  Gone: Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (Madison), Art of Simple Food (Waters), Mexican Everyday (Bayless). My mother went jacketless eventually with her 1953 Joy of Cooking and almost immediately with Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the two from her that I use most. 

Dust jackets still on but beginning to shred: Herbfarm (Traunfeld), Mediterranean Slow Food (Wolfert), Authentic Mexican (Bayless).

What I like best are the jacketless slick hard covers like Plenty, Splendid Table's How to Cook Supper, Essentals of Cooking (Peterson), Sonia Uvezian's Eastern Mediterranean cookbook.  Next best is a well-made trade paperback with slick cover -- Silver Palate Good Times, Victory Garden Cookbook, and Paula Wolfert's Couscous have all held up to heavy use.  Victory Garden was particularly high quality in physical terms as well as content; I was lucky enough to find a used one for less than $20 on the big auction site, but it's worth the higher prices it more typically fetches. It's one of the great ones.

On the other end of the spectrum, I curse the physical production people at Knopf every time I pick up either volume of Vegetarian Epicure, which is often. The paper is dark yellow and flaking apart, and the bindings cracked early on.  Just got Thomas' Love Soup out of the library this week; though it's the same format, and clearly designed to sit beside Veg Ep on the shelves of its target demographic, the paper and binding are designed to last.  Wish I could wave a wand to convert my precious old Veg Ep's to that standard...