Groovy graphics and discount prices are not the only reasons to seek out vintage cookbooks, which are enjoying something of a renaissance through Web sites and bookstores.

For some fans, it's the comedy.

"Sandwich loaf," said Amy Alessio, who has about 250 vintage cookbooks and blogs about them at vintagecookbooks.blogspot.com. "What on earth was that about?"

To make one, take a loaf of unsliced white bread, cut off the crusts and slice the bread horizontally. Spread the layers with butter and then with ham, egg or shrimp salad, then stack them and slather the reconstructed loaf with cream cheese sometimes tinted pink or green. Decorate with herbs and raw vegetables. To serve, cut the loaf into the patterned slices sometimes called ribbon sandwiches.

"Every time I think I've discovered the most disgusting version of this I find a worse one," writes Ms. Alessio, a young-adult librarian and author in Schaumburg, Ill. "Why was it so sophisticated to serve this?"

Yet when she blogged about these confection-like concoctions, she was amazed to find that people love sandwich loaves, one of several "scariest trends" she's uncovered in vintage cookbooks.

"Prunes come up in just about every old cookbook. Prune whip is huge," Ms. Alessio said. "Another trend is Hawaiian, when the state joined the union [in 1959]. Usually it means the dish had a little pineapple in it, or coconut. And serving things in a wheel," such as the Baked Bean Pie from the 1967 Better Homes and Gardens book, "Jiffy Cooking."

"We actually ate that" right down to the Spam spokes, said Ms. Alessio, who tests vintage recipes on her husband and two young sons.

Mmm, mmm good.

Truly great, classic recipes, of course, are why some vintage cookbooks have a long shelf life, as Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," first published in 1961 and at long last a best-seller, is proving. (Having a movie tie-in doesn't hurt, either.)

"Mastering" has never been out of print; Oakland's Caliban Book Shop has a first edition for $300; other stores offer it online for between $575 and $3,500 and later editions for as low as $12.25. Just be careful, if you buy a 1970 first edition of Vol. II, to not follow the author's advice for baking French bread on a slab of "asbestos cement." After editor Judith Jones learned scientists were beginning to suspect asbestos was carcinogenic, that was changed to terra cotta or stone tile for the second edition, as Mrs. Child revealed in "My Life in France."

Sometimes, it's the later editions that don't measure up to the original.

One of the most desirable vintage cookbooks is "Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book," wrote the late Cincinnati cookbook author Mary Anna DuSablon in "America's Collectible Cookbooks: The History, The Politics, The Recipes," calling "Picture" the greatest cookbook General Mills ever produced.

It is also, she wrote, the top-selling cookbook in American history, with an estimated 55 million copies sold by the time Ms. DuSablon's book came out in 1994. She called the version available in the early 1990s, however, "completely unrecognizable."

In the 1950s editions, "The recipes were clear, producing no-fail, delectable results. There was just enough explanation to do it right the first time, along with a few sentences of encouragement, perhaps with an impudent exclamation point," Ms. DuSablon wrote. "Taking the best ideas from all previous best-sellers," the book was a "unique, highly stylized presentation," and "absolutely consistent." Betty Crocker's "enviable and lasting reputation was grounded'' in the 1950s achievement.

Someone must have gotten the word, because since 1998 Wylie has published a ring-bound facsimile edition of the 1950 original that sells for $29.95.

One of the influences on "Picture" was another best-seller, Irma Rombauer's "The Joy of Cooking," published in 1936 by Bobbs-Merrill and co-authored after 1952 with her daughter Marian Rombauer Becker, who had heavily contributed from the beginning. Propelled by its witty, authoritative voice, user-friendly recipes and encyclopedic range, "Joy" has sold more than 18 million copies to date. Pretty good for an independent work not associated, as its authors liked to point out, with a corporate backer such as General Mills or Pillsbury.

In 1998, "Joy" got its own facsimile edition of the original work, self-published by Mrs. Rombauer in 1931. And the 2006 75th anniversary edition returned to the original "Joy" format, after the 1997 edition dropped the first-person voice and made other out-of-character changes.

Most vintage cookbooks available online and in used bookstores date from the 1950s to the 1980s and many are out of print, making them more attractive to collectors. Pre-1950 cookbooks are less widely available.

But among the cookbooks at Eljay's Used Books on the South Side recently was "Getting Started," a 1935 guide to homemaking for "that ever increasing and important army of new Housewives." More than half of it is devoted to cooking in a section called "The Way to His Heart," a path strewn with Bacon Muffins, Stuffed Eggs in Jellied Mayonnaise and Macaroni Mousse.

Among the favorites of Ms. Alessio, whose blog reached a high of 1,800 hits in August when she became obsessed with salmon mousse, are Southern Living magazine's Southern Heritage series, published in the 1980s.

"The cakes are great," she said. "There are stories and backgrounds about the cooks, too. You can read them like a novel."

She also cites "Square Meals," Jane and Michael Stern's 1984 cookbook about pre-1960 cookbooks, as an influence. Many of its recipes are drawn from cookbooks and pamphlets produced by food companies and appliance manufacturers ­-- "appetite inspired by advertising copy," as John Thorne wrote in his book review.

"Here are dishes that, to your eternal shame, you once thought really terrific -- vulgar, vulgar food you once admired as the height of class," Mr. Thorne wrote.

"What hurts is not that we cooked and ate this food, but that we aspired to do so..."

And still do today. At the photo-sharing Web site flickr.com, more than 4,700 images of cookbook pages and covers are posted in the Vintage Cookbooks pool, which has 1,163 members. For many, the peppy, stylized graphics of the "Mad Men" era are a big part of the cookbooks' appeal. A related flickr group is the Mid-Century Supper Club, whose 402 members post not only photographs of dishes from vintage cookbooks, but also their own home-cooked versions.

Despite some people's doubts that anyone actually cooked this way, for Ms. Alessio and others, it's remembrance of their mothers' and grandmothers' cooking that helps drive the interest in vintage cookbooks from the 1950s and '60s. Are we hungry for a time when Mom, happily or not, was pretty much guaranteed to be in the kitchen, not negotiating six-figure deals on her iPhone?

"I find that era fascinating, when food and its preparation were a competitive art form for women. Parties showcased food items that took hours of preparation and planning," Ms. Alessio explained in an e-mail. "Those women were clearly resourceful, elegant and hard working -- their homes were masterpieces. I enjoy hearing memories of my parents and in-laws, and I noticed that many memories were tied in with special foods."

Discovering handwritten notes tucked into cookbooks or written in the margins of their pages, "I can imagine the life where those foods were served," she continued. "Since I was pretty young when my mom's mom passed away, I feel closer to her with the cookbooks somehow."

For Alice Demetrius Stock of Mt. Lebanon, feeling a connection with the mother she lost when she was 16 is part of the appeal of old cookbooks. Among those she inherited is "The American Heritage Cookbook," purchased through a cookbook club "because mothers did not drive in those days."

About 10 percent of the almost 1,000 cookbooks Ms. Stock owns are vintage ones; the oldest is an 1866 edition of "Beeton's Book of Household Management," edited by Isabella Beeton, the hard-working wife of London publisher Samuel Beeton. Motivated by "the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement," Mrs. Beeton's work is mainly a cookbook, each recipe tested by herself, her cook or her maid.

As a former librarian and teacher, Ms. Stock said her primary interest is in preserving the history of women and homemaking. She also collects recipe clippings from magazines, school lunch menus and other ephemera, and has a special fondness for spiral-bound charity cookbooks.

"I want something personal that someone put their heart and soul in. And those are recipes people actually use," said Ms. Stock, who wrote the monthly Vintage Cookbooks column for the Post-Gazette for eight years beginning in 1996.

Dawn Higgins of suburban Chicago launched her online store, thecookbookery.com, two years ago after buying, for $300, a collection of 4,000 cookbooks accumulated by a woman whose family asked only that the books go to people who appreciate them.

Ms. Higgins' inventory now numbers almost 20,000 books, which she keeps in a climate-controlled storage unit. She has no plans to open a storefront; the online shop supports her. Her daughters, both just out of college, and other family members help out.

"I've always loved old cookbooks," Ms. Higgins said. "Who would think that would actually turn into a business? This morning alone I had to ship 17 cookbooks from [orders that came in] overnight."

She has sent books to Germany, England, Norway, Australia and all over the U.S. If she doesn't have a customer's sought-after book in stock, she will send it when she locates it before listing it on her Web site.

"We get a lot of requests for the Kerr home canning book," she said. "Ethnic cookbooks are popular. Polish cookbooks are huge, and Mexican and Greek. People buy a lot of the old casserole cookbooks. Julia Child, right now you can't keep anything and before the ["Julie and Julia"] movie, you could hold onto it for a long time. The other one that goes quick is 'The Joy of Cooking.' "

Her personal favorites include "The White House Cook Book" of 1887, regional cookbooks and novelties such as "Elsie's Cook Book" from 1952, featuring Borden's Elsie the Cow.

"I always imagine where that cookbook has been, and the woman who was using it at that time, and especially with war-time cookbooks, what that time period was like," Ms. Higgins said. "It's almost like a little treasure every time you open a cookbook."

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