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I love my cookbook collection. One of the most fun and useful hobbies I have is collecting cookbooks. It's fun because browsing my cookbooks have brought endless hours of fascination, discovery, and experimentation in the kitchen. Of course, collecting cookbooks is incredibly useful because my husband and I get to eat the "fruits" of my labors. I say, I love it because I shared this hobby with a dear friend, Kelvin.

My cookbook collecting behavior didn't actually start out as a hobby. I mean, I didn't wake up one day and say, "Gee, I think I'll start collecting cookbooks." It was more of a natural process borne out of my initial interest to learn how to cook. I got my first cookbook as a wedding gift in 1971. A red-covered 3 ring binder with pie-shaped pictures of food on the front, my Betty Crocker's Cookbook has been and still is one of my most-used cookbooks. Pages that have gotten accidentally ripped out, dividers with the typed category label partially torn off, and an errant hand-scribbled recipe on scratch paper stuck between the pages, ah, now that's a cookbook.

Eventually, my tastes in cookbooks changed: rather than "store-bought" cookbooks, my next cookbook binge would be locally made recipe compilation cookbooks. First, I purchased the "Caterpillar Girls' Club Cook Book" from a friend who worked at the local Caterpillar plant. With 264 pages of hand-typed recipes and no pictures, this cookbook had the best recipes for "Saucy No-Bake Baked Beans" and "Sloppy Joes." To this day, I have these pages marked and make these recipes at least monthly.

The next compilation cookbook I got was the "Illinois Plumberette Cookbook" by the Women's Auxiliary. Then came the "Mt. Zion United Methodist Church Cookbook" followed by "Simple Pleasures-Junior Welfare Association" from the town where I lived at the time. Years later, I would contribute several of my own favorite recipes for inclusion in a cookbook called, "Children's Home: Recipes from Our Home to Yours."

After moving into what my husband and I call "the house on the lake" several years ago, I met Kelvin and his friend, Dan-our next door neighbors. Kelvin was a gourmet cook. He's the first and only gourmet cook I have ever known personally. He introduced me to the finer things in the kitchen and the cookbooks. He had a cookbook collection unrivaled by anyone I had ever known. He had, "The Joy of Cooking," and all of Julia Child's cookbooks. He simmered sauces and served beautiful desserts. His entrees were

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