Old cookery books falling apart

You can't really see the worst of this here as I carefully arranged my Great Dishes of the World cookbook by Robert Carrier but it is literally falling apart. There are individual pages - several of them - that have quite come adrift. I got it out the other day when I was 'doing' sauerkraut which is why this was brought to mind. I often get it out and every time it falls apart just a little bit more. I think this is the worst of the bunch though. It might have something to do with the original binding - I only have the paperback version and it was just glued at the spine, and not very well I think. There was very little 'give' when you opened the pages.

So what shall I do? I couldn't possibly throw it out even though I just looked it up on Abe Books and it seems I can replace it with a later edition for a mere $1.00. So should I do that?

It won't be the same though will it? A couple of years ago my lovely and thoughtful daughter-in-law bought me a second-hand replacement copy of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking and I do use it but stupidly and surprisingly I find myself reaching for my old copy first which is also falling apart.

Nearly all of my old cookery books are paperbacks and they were not as well made back then. Some of them I have culled from my collection anyway, and some are not used a lot but some are used really quite often, so they too will probably fall apart. I wonder how much worse they need to be before they really cannot be used. I should have bought hard copies back then, but (a) I probably couldn't afford it, and (b) how do you know which books are going to be loved in the future and which will not? And on the affordability side, I have always kicked myself for not buying Robert Carrier's large and magnificent hardback A Taste of Morocco for it is now a little hard to find. The France the Beautiful Cookbook too. If only for the pictures. At the time it would have been an extravagance rather than an impossibility, but I was too stuck in a 'poor' outlook on life and so didn't splurge. I should have.

So in the meantime I shall struggle on with what I have I think. I don't like to give up on my old friends. And it's not that they are covered with personal little notes and scribblings in the margins. I tend not to do that unless the recipe has left something out or there is something you really should know that is a bit hidden. So I can't really explain why I would want to hang on to them. Indeed I have some that I am reluctant to throw out but which I know in my heart of hearts I shall never use them again. Unless they come up in a Lucky Dip someday.

These days I guess I tend to stick to hardbacks and anyway I don't buy so many. There are not many new books whose content hasn't been covered already by my huge library. There are some I would still like and I do keep my eye out for specials that might come up here and there, but my buying rate has slowed down considerably.

What would you do?