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How do you approach your cookbook collection?  I'm struggling with a lack of space.  I still really like my cookbooks for reference, discovery, and nostalgia.  I'm trying to find some criteria tighter than "it sparks joy" because that's too broad. :-) 

There's the idea of only keeping books that are already indexed here.

I'm thinking about my magazine recipe annuals.  Some are indexed some are not.  They are not particularly good for picking up and browsing as they are dense, but they are good once indexed. And then there are the digital subscriptions that give access to archives, like cooks illustrated, cooking light, sunset  southern living, etc

I love the community fundraiser books for their chaos and local character.  

I like 19th century cookbooks and older editions to compare how recipes have changed over time.

I generally google now for quick reference.  I try to find 2-3 different recipes and look for the common themes when trying something new.  However, sites like allrecipes.com drive me nuts as people will give a 5 star rating, then post in their review how they changed 5 ingredients and it was perfect. Allrecipes is like the fundraiser cookbooks with all the chaos and none of the charm.  I have a bit more trust of my cookbooks as someone went to the trouble to put their name on it, hopefully, test the recipes and someone else thought it was worth publishing.  

The other problem with google and pinterest is just the sheer quantity of options and the associated noise from ads, bad layout, bad editing, or no editing (dang some of these blogs can go on and on and on).

As far as keeping my own recipes, I'm currently using tap forms on my phone to track my pantry and shopping list, as I prepare things, I log each finished dish as its own record.

So what compromises have you made to keep your collection manageable, alive and relevant to your cooking today? 

I deal in two languages and as such, my home collections of books and magazines are in both English and Japanese.  I have over 2000 or so books in my collection spread out in my office area including the closet in the office area for Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines and towards 3 large bookcases near the entrance door.  I usually don't have to make any special note on where to find the books - I guess my memory is pretty good. 

I have all the gourmet books since inception to the end, Bon Appetit since mid 70's, F&W, Saveur, Cuisine etc for over 25 or so years.  I have problems finding  recipes in those since online sources are for less than 10 years.  I always think I may have some time to go through them to set up some kind of index but have not done so and maybe I never will.  But, I don't want to get rid of them as there are some super good recipes  there I remember making long time ago.  I have to find them again. 

I have online access to all of Cook's Illustrated etc, cuisines at home, and Milk Street in English.  I also belong to several online sources for cooking in Japanese ie cookpad and Kyono Ryori. 

Besides those, I have my own data base of recipes I keep and those are copymethat, pepperplate, and mastercook in English.  And another database much like mastercook in Japanese.  I can't live without copymethat and pepperplate anymore.  I store my favorite recipes there.  Although I must have like 5000 recipes in mastercook, I don't use it much anymore because I have problems with their small font as I've gotten older.  I can't enlarge it. 

I normally don't google for recipes since I have enough places I can search with my own stuff.

Forgot. I also have a growing kindle books.  As far as culling, I don't think that will happen in my lifetime. 

Rinshin I have to agree with you - I will not get rid of any of my cookbooks as there are some great recipes in them. Like you I don't know if I'm going to get around to referencing the unindexed cookbooks I have but too bad - I'm keeping them anyway. I plan to have a built-in bookcase built along one of the walls in my house to hold them all.

And of course there is always the chance that EYB will index one of your older books or magazines or that a member indexer will step up. Then it would be annoying if you had got rid of it!

My own collection is ever growing and I can't see I will ever get rid of my cookbooks as long as I have the space. However I am seriously considering the magazines should go. I have decades of Gourmet and Bon Appetit plus several years of Food & Wine and all of Lucky Peach and Food Arts. I don't ever refer to them for recipes and I don't have the time to re-read articles (or for magazines from the last 10 years, since I started EYB, reading for the first time). So many of the recipes from Gourmet and Bon Appetit are in the big cookbooks which I also own or are available online.

katyfrance - you shouldn't need to Google for recipes! You have 42,000+ recipes in your EYB searches.

I'm still building, I haven't thrown any cookbooks away yet. I only have 500 or so. That's small for this crowd.

I had a big cull of cookbooks three years ago when I moved house and haven't missed any of the older ones I got rid of. One of my main critieria for whether a book stayed or not was whether it was indexed by Eat Your Books. When  I started to use this website it sent me back to great recipes I had forgotten about in my older books. I am a great believer in sticking with good quality cookbooks - so many recipes on the internet are of very dubious quality. People beat themselves up when dishes don't turn out well when often the recipe is the problem. There is also the difficulty of finding them again, whereas with Eat Your Books you can bookmark them for future use. I also had a very big collection of old food magazines, and I slowly browsed my way through them, clipping the recipes that I seriously liked the look of, and put them in scrapbooks, and then discarded the magazines. I have been keeping scrapbooks of recipes since I was a teenager, and now I actually index my scrapbooks using the personal recipes facility in Eat Your books, which is really worth while. You can also use it to keep track of a recipe in an unindexed book - it took me a little while to think of that.

Originally Posted by: tui

I had a big cull of cookbooks three years ago when I moved house and haven't missed any of the older ones I got rid of. One of my main critieria for whether a book stayed or not was whether it was indexed by Eat Your Books. When  I started to use this website it sent me back to great recipes I had forgotten about in my older books. I am a great believer in sticking with good quality cookbooks - so many recipes on the internet are of very dubious quality. People beat themselves up when dishes don't turn out well when often the recipe is the problem. There is also the difficulty of finding them again, whereas with Eat Your Books you can bookmark them for future use. I also had a very big collection of old food magazines, and I slowly browsed my way through them, clipping the recipes that I seriously liked the look of, and put them in scrapbooks, and then discarded the magazines. I have been keeping scrapbooks of recipes since I was a teenager, and now I actually index my scrapbooks using the personal recipes facility in Eat Your books, which is really worth while. You can also use it to keep track of a recipe in an unindexed book - it took me a little while to think of that.

I am in the process of culling through cookbooks, food magazines, printed copies of internet recipes, scraps of recipes torn from womens magazines, scraps of recipes saved from supermarket magazines.....and it goes on and on!  I started with giving away clothes and shoes after reading Marie Kondo's book on how to declutter and I've concluded that I really need to get rid of stuff!  I like what you said about slowly going through old food magazines, and keeping the recipes that really mean something.  I thought this would be the sensible way to cull them, and have been dreading it but I now feel comforted because you have done this! ha ha!  And I have also started recipe journals, and keeping recipes that matter in the journals, and indexing them on EYB via the personal recipes facility too!

I also am decluttering magazines...25 years' worth of Gourmet, Sunset, Bon Appetit and more!  Every month I add to the unmanageable collection with subscriptions from Saveur to Rachael Ray.  I now try to go through one old magazine a day, ripping out good-looking things.  These pages go into an antique Japanese pine box, for further study in the future.  All right....I am perfectly aware that these clippings stand little chance of being read again (the stack of pages is towards a foot tall!).  However, I feel better knowing that I haven't discarded that One Perfect Recipe (sometimes made for 6 servings [lots of kids then] to a single [just me now] serving).  Takes confidence to throw away treasures.

Glad to know that there are other mildly compulsive people out there who collect recipes from magazines and actually organise them!

I only have one 4 ft. shelf for cookbooks.  If I get a new cookbook but it isn't from one of my top authors, I will get it as an e-book.  I will only buy the hard copy if I find that I used (not just read or browsed) the e-book.

That doesn't do much to help with culling existing books, but it stops it from getting bigger. 

Getting rid of books:

I mostly cook vegan food so when I moved I gave up most of my non-vegetarian books unless they had items that my husband really likes.

I'm thinking of penciling in the date I use a book inside the back cover, then next year using that info to vote books off the shelf.

I have three large bookcases in the family room and I'm determined to keep my collection to these shelves.  Unfortunately, I've been unsuccessful, cookbooks are spilling onto the seat of the brick fire place, the tops of every piece of furniture in the master bedroom and now onto the spare bedroom floor.  My heart hurts everytime I thin out my collection.  A year ago I got rid of all my old food magazines without looking through them first!!  OMG I was traumatized, but I proved to myself that I could do it.  Going forward, my critieria for keeping a book is that it must be indexed here at EYB, it must fit how my family currently eats (fresh, seasonal and vegetable centric) and no annuals. Thanks to EYB, I can now see that all the recipes in the Cook's Illustrated Annuals can be found in many of their other cookbooks so the annuals are duplicates. Also, my buying strategy has changed; I rarely buy dessert books or meat based books.

ahhh, same here.  As I've gotten older, I hardly ever make desserts and so my usage of dessert cookbooks is dwindling. 

I now try to stick to kindle for English language cookbooks if I can get them that way.  I can't buy kindle books via Amazon Japan unless I live there so I'm still increasing in those books unfortunately.

I've found it helpful to think about how much cooking there is left in my life. Let's say 40 years, 300 a year - so 12000. And my tastes have changed over time, so it's unlikely that all of those come from the recipes I have now. Even so, I have sufficient material for the rest of my life from cookbooks I really like.

That is quite liberating: I keep the really good ones (for me/those I cook for) - around ten are currently in this 'would definitely buy again if lost' and those to which I have a sentimental attachment (presents, particular time in life) - another twenty perhaps? I then have space for another thirty or so, which is currently full with books I've collected over time, but which may well make their way to Oxfam or the public bookshelf library when I have time to weed out a bit.

If I happen to give away a book I then later think I would really like to cook from - no problem. The chances are pretty good I can find the book or something similar again, and in the meantime hopefully someone else actually used the book rather than it gathering dust here.

I found that I never actually cook from recipes collected from magazines, so have stopped doing that.  

For finding cookbooks, I've found recommendations from friends and chowhound really useful. I used to buy books on impulse, but that hasn't led to the most used ones...

I have been culling my cookbooks as well, and this past weekend have pulled 3 shopping bags worth from my collection (not a lot but it's something).  I love cookbooks for the same reasons others mention; and am constantly adding to my collection (but trying to be very judicious!).

I hope someday to have a room where I can have nice book shelves for these books. Right now they are stored in a mishmash of book cases across 2 different rooms.

I check out electronic versions of cookbooks from the library when I can't borrow a hard copy and use those to see whether the book is something I like well enough to buy. So far, the e-cookbook format has not enticed me enough to buy in that format.

My cooking habits vary, but I love to experiment, revisit favorites etc. so I only let go of books I have not looked at much, never cooked from or that don't inspire me.

Tiganna, I really like your idea of keeping the ones that you'd definitely buy again if lost and will keep that in my brain when I have my next culling session.

Well, never say never I suppose.  After almost 40 years in the same house that we love, I need to make room for new books I purchase monthly from Japan.  We just finished moving almost 1/2 of my books/magazines out of my office to paint and seeing all the books/magazines piled neatly in the hallway to keep them in exact order I have while working, decided to get rid of at least newest 10 year worth of Bon Appetit since I can find the recipes online for those.  Also threw out all the recipes I've printed over the years before ipad.  That was at least 2 ft pile!

Last year I made it a goal to get rid of 40 bags of stuff from my home during the 40 days of Lent.  I didn't meet my goal but I did get rid of quite a bit.  I was happy to get rid of some cookbooks I knew I'd never use and donate them to a thrift shop which benefits domestic violence survivors.

I'm not sentimental and find that hanging onto things actually creates stress.  I have tons of bookshelf space and feel the need to empty many of those shelves soon.  I have a glut of homeschooling books and haven't homeschooled for 6 years so those books need to go.

I also plan to go through the cookbooks and simply get rid of any I know I'll never use.  Some people love to hang onto things just so they can say they have a large number (I see this on a knitting site when people talk about how much yarn they have - yarn they couldn't possibly use in 3 lifetimes).  If people have thousands of cookcooks they're not using them - they're just dust collectors.