Review of "300 YEARS OF Kitchen Collectibles"

300 Years of Kitchen Collectibles by Linda Campbell Franklin is an extremely handy book to have if you are into collecting cast iron kitchenware or any other item for the kitchen. I refer to this book as the encyclopedia. At 896 pages long, 300 Years would seem to cover everything!

There are not enough pictures in 300 Years, very few in fact. Mostly what you get is a brief description for most items and maybe a drawing here and there with a few photographs thrown in. While this doesn't seem like much it in fact is quite comprehensive and requires a lot of reading to match things. A tremendous amount of research went into the compilation of this material I'm sure!

This book contains a very nice section on cast iron muffin pans with pictures of most of them. The muffin pan section goes way beyond just Griswold and Wagner pans, which I find extremely helpful! You may run across an odd piece of unmarked cast iron, as I have, when I bought a muffin pan for my wife and then found it was actually worth about $45 and is collectible. The photographs that are included are excellent.

300 Years also includes lots of fraud or reproduction alerts to help the novice collector keep from being taken advantage of. There are also old recipes included along with old advertising stuff, measuring conversions, history, definitions, and a whole host of other things. The bibliography is extremely impressive and can lead you to a lot of other collecting books that might be more in line with your specialty of collecting.

If you are interested in collecting items for the kitchen, then this book is indispensable! If you are a cast iron collector, then you probably will be disappointed in this book, although I use it all the time because it goes beyond the basic Griswold and Wagner collecting. I like this book and recommend it highly.