Revisiting an online vintage cookbook archive

October 18, 2022 by
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Over six years ago, I wrote about the Cookbook and Home Economics Collection at the Internet Archive and its impressive section of cookery books. Previously the catalog drew from works housed by the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, the Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. Today the archive has additional sources including libraries around the world.

Back in 2016, the collection contained over 3,800 works, which has now blossomed to an impressive 12,286 items. Many of the older works have been scanned and are available for download in several formats including Kindle and PDF. The books aren’t limited to U.S. or English language publications. The archive also includes pamphlets from food and equipment companies; recipe collections from newspapers and women’s clubs; and books on topics ranging from French pastries to homemade wine to uses for canned salmon. 

You can search both the metadata (author, title, date, etc.) and the books’ contents themselves. The site includes filters so you can narrow the search by year (with the filter indicating how many volumes are available for each year), topic, creator/author, and language. While the initial collection focused on vintage books, there are now hundreds of modern books as well, all the way to the present. Much of the growth in the collection is in cookbooks published from the 1980s to the 2010s (several thousand volumes). For example, 1995 includes 445 books, represented by everything from product-related publications such as a Campbell’s Soup cookbook to classics like Madhur Jaffrey’s The Flavours of India. While everyone has access to limited previews, viewing an entire book may be restricted to account holders. You can register for a free account at archive.org. Even if you don’t sign up for an account, you’ll probably enjoy spending a significant amount of time browsing the site.

Category: Cookbook Lovers

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6 Comments

  • rochkay  on  October 19, 2022

    Wow, thanks for sharing. They have a fantastic collection of vintage cookbooks!

  • DeborahG  on  October 20, 2022

    Absolutely fantastic. I signed up and on the first page of the collection was a cookbook I immediately recognised – The American Woman’s Cookbook, published in 1939. There’s a copy on my Mum’s bookshelf in the Highlands of Scotland and she inherited it from my grandmother who lived in the US for a short time. My Mum is 93 and now lives in a care home. It was so nice to see this book. Thank you for sharing this wonderful resource.

  • averythingcooks  on  October 20, 2022

    I have a 1949 copy of the American Woman’s Cookbook on our special shelf (a gift from my father in law that he found amongst stored items from his family home).

    And I now have an account with the archive – so many thanks for this blog post.

  • Wende  on  October 20, 2022

    For anyone who did not get a chance to download their favorite recipes from Fine Cooking magazine before the site was taken down, all of the issues are archived in the Food & Cooking magazine section of this site!

  • amylou61  on  October 21, 2022

    This is awesome! Thanks so much for sharing 🙂

  • Brunettepet  on  October 27, 2022

    Thanks for sharing this resource,

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