Manhattan:  For more than a dozen years, the lively and hospitable Emily Gilder was personal assistant to the legendary James Beard.  Sitting just across from Beard on the lower floor of his Greenwich Village townhouse, she sorted his mail, arranged his appointments, tried to manage his commitments and his often challenging checkbook.

Beard spent much of every morning chatting on the phone with friends, colleagues and, often, complete strangers (his phone number was always listed).  Gilder listened in on many of these conversations and often read his mail, or listened as Beard read aloud from the latest missive from MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David or Paul Bocuse.

As John Carroll, Beard’s West Coast assistant, wrote in a San Francisco Professional Food Society newsletter a few months after the great man died in 1985, “James was more a romanticist than a sentimentalist, and in his decades of travel, I don’t think he ever owned a camera or kept a diary, and photographs and momentos weren’t terribly important.”

Not so for Gilder.  During the last decade of Beard’s life she carefully, and discretely, fished letters, articles, photos, first drafts and other historically significant dross from the garbage can between their seats.  In 1986 she entrusted this memorable cache to me illiciting my promise to “do the right thing with it, when the time comes.”

The time and place have arrived.  Over the last few months I have placed every scrap in the capable hands of Marvin Taylor, Head Curator of New York University’s Fales Rare Book Library. Soon, all of the pieces, to be known as “The Beard Papers,” will be available for study to students, writers and anyone with a bonafied academic interest in food, New York or American 20th century history.  They will be placed along with the Brownstone Collection of cookbooks, numbering more than twelve thousand volumes, acquired last year from Cecily Brownstone, Beard’s friend and the longtime AP Food Editor.

On Tuesday, October 21st, the Fales Library will host a reading of excerpts, including a handwriting analysis of Beard commissioned by The Bergen Record in 1981, that I will happily host with the help of (and readings by) his book editor from Alfred A. Knopf, Judith Jones, Gourmet Magazine Editor Ruth Reichl, historian Betty Fussell and NYU’s own Marion Nestle.  Photos and some of the original letters will be on display to celebrate the collection in this, the year that would have heralded Beard’s 100th birthday.

On September 22, 1975, MFK Fisher wrote from her Boverie Ranch, near the town of Glen Ellen in Sonoma, California, “It was so good to talk to you yesterday, dear Jim!  Thank you for calling.  I’m sorry you misbehaved in Venice, but you know how to follow your chosen pattern, and there’s nothing the rest of us can do about you except flap our hands helplessly now and then.”

Emily Gilder knew what to do.  She saved every nubbin and tidbit she could find.