California Book Fair Scheduled Next Saturday at Glendale Civic

Back around 1902, The Times printed a cookbook of 453 recipes (among them 76 “Spanish” dishes), each signed by one of the leading “society ladies” of the era, each a winner of a contest sponsored by the newspaper. The book is now worth $500 to the first canny pack rat to find it in her/his trunk, dust it off and bring it to the California Book Fair Associates’ seventh fair, to be held next Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. at the Glendale Civic Auditorium, 1401 N. Verdugo Road.

More than 175 book dealers will be on the lookout for what the average cluttered household considers a doorstop, but what they know to be a treasure.

Among the more coveted tomes: all 12 issues of The Marionette, a periodical published in 1918-1919, worth $1,000 to Palo Alto’s Theater Bookshop; “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1919, for which Oasis Antiquarian Books in San Diego is willing to part with $600; a dust-jacketed first edition of Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” assessed at up to $600 by Merlin’s Bookshop in Isla Vista in Santa Barbara County.

Further, the owner of Gluttony Books in La Verne says he’ll “mortgage my house” for a crack at a top-condition “Peerless Receipt Book,” first cookbook to be published in California.

Then, of course, there’s always a chance you have the elusive “Shakespeare’s First Folio” under the moldering dreck in that box in the attic. . . .

Admission is $3. Information: (213) 875-0555.