Chapter and verse on vegetarianism

CAMBRIDGE -- Twelve years ago Jim Whitten, a third-grade teacher, became a vegetarian when his college roommate, the son of a rancher, shared some gory details about where food really comes from. It took Whitten time to figure out that there was more to being a vegetarian than just eschewing meat. Living in New York, above a pizzeria and a 24- hour McDonald ' s, says the teacher, on the phone from Suffield, Conn., where he now lives, he existed on junk food. "Cans of Budweiser and cheese pizza were vegetarian but not exactly healthy." Six years ago, he became vegan. "After that the clouds parted. The food that was slowing my body down and slowing my thoughts down was gone from my life." He quit a job in advertising, moved back to his hometown, and started teaching.

He also began collecting vegetarian cookbooks and other related ephemera, until he had more than 200 American and British volumes and periodicals dating from the 17th century to the present, as well as menus, autographs of well-known vegetarians, even a plastic guitar pick belonging to the late Linda McCartney.

This fall, Whitten sold his collection to the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Right now, the new acquisition s are stored in 11 boxes, but after they are catalog ed and put in protective covers, the items will be available for viewing by the public. Marylene Altieri, the library's curator of books and printed materials, says that "the sheer quantity of the collection is staggering. The extent is really significant. It will be interesting to see how it fits in with our culinary holdings and resources on women and reform movements." The Schlesinger Library's 15,000-volume culinary collection includes the papers of the late Julia Child, celebrated food writers M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, and "Joy of Cooking" author Irma Rombauer and her daughter Marion Becker.

Whitten, 33, has been collecting books since high school when his dad gave him a first edition of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." He went to Bentley College , then moved to New York for his advertising job. For fun, and to make a few bucks, he collected and then sold signed books and first editions. When important authors were signing books in New York, Whitten waited in line to buy them and have them autographed. "For 20 bucks each, I bought a couple of copies of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" right when the movie came out and Johnny Depp and Hunter S. Thompson signed them," he says. "They're worth hundreds now."

His vegetarian collection started when he met vegetarian scholar Rynn Berry in New York. Berry had suggested to Whitten that he focus his books on a single subject and with that direction, Whitten became a collector of volumes about going meatless. He learned which books were important, then spent months tracking down individual titles. Some of his favorites -- like "The Pythagorean Diet," a 1745 volume by Antonio Cocchi, and a couple of Shaker texts from the 1800s -- are rare and valuable. "Actually it got to a point where most of the books were too valuable to read," he says. "They were old and brittle and I didn't want to damage them."

The collection offers everything from the scholarly ("A History of the Vegetarian Movement," written in 1898 by Charles Forward and not seen on the market in years), to the amusing ( Berry's "Famous Vegetarians and Their Favorite Recipes," which covers vegetarians from Jesus to Cloris Leachman). Sylvester Graham, the 19th-century New England diet guru most famous for the Graham cracker, is represented by dozens of publications. Whitten feels a deep connection to Graham and once even appeared on MTV as a Graham historian.

The teacher's hope is that the collection might be a starting point to understand how our society could move toward universal vegetarianism. "For me vegetarianism was a spiritual choice, but it also has to do with health, animal rights, and the environment," he says. He remembers a Time magazine story he read in 2002 that "predicted . . . we would be a vegetarian society within the next 100 years."

About a year ago, Whitten decided he didn't want to keep the books. "I felt like I had created a monster," he says. "I had no interest in it anymore. I would see things pop up for sale but I had lost the urge." Last summer he asked his girlfriend to marry him and put the books up for sale. "It was kind of a business move to free up some money," he says. "And Radcliffe is such a great home for the collection."

Since selling the books, Whitten has been thinking about his wedding but hasn't entirely stopped collecting. He's been focusing his energy on signed poetry books. "I've been buying a lot of Pulitzer Prize winners," he says. "I just bought Franz Wright's 'Walking to Martha's Vineyard.' I think it will be a good investment."