Don Lindgren BIO

Don Lindgren is an antiquarian bookseller focused on printed and manuscript cookery. His bookselling business, Rabelais Inc., acquires, researches, and sells rare books, manuscripts, ephemera, and other materials related to culinary history. Clients for books and for services such as appraisals and collection development include private collectors, food professionals, and research institutions worldwide. Don has served as a Governor of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America and is a member of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, the Ephemera Society of America, and the Bibliographic Society of America. He has lectured or presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, and Rare Book School’s Boston Seminar. In 2019 he co-authored and published the first part of a multi-volume exploration of the American community cookbook, titled UnXld: American Cookbooks of Community & Place. He lives with his dog Lark on a small farm in Southern Maine.

TALK DESCRIPTION

For more than one hundred fifty years, women have gathered around kitchen tables, in church basements, and in meeting halls, to collect and organize recipes. They were doing the work of making cookbooks. To do this work, the women exercised all the functions of commercial publishers: they solicited content; sought financial backing; edited, designed and illustrated; hired printers and binders; and marketed and distributed their product—often a shoestring budget with little or no exposure to, or guidance from, traditional publishing. The fruit of this labor is a legacy of many thousands of works, produced by amateurs (in the best sense of the word), a distinctively American expression of fellowship, creativity, and purposefulness: the community cookbook.

American community cookbooks were largely women’s enterprises, but many of the requirements of traditional publishing existed at or beyond the limits of women’s power at the time. The work of creating a formal association, financing the printing and binding of books, registering copyright, and the marketing and distribution of a finished book, all required women to employ creative “work-arounds.” To the contemporary viewer, this creative problem-solving might be described as D.I.Y. thinking, crowd-funding, or crowd-sourcing. This approach often left somewhat eccentric traces in the material object of the community cookbook. Also visible in the books, and in the world at large, is the significant record of achievement made possible with the proceeds from their sales. This talk will address the achievements of the community cookbooks makers, of the eccentric legacy of material object left behind, and how the community cookbooks emerged as a very real agent of change.