A word of introduction on how I came into possession of the the collected writings of Mr. U. Arsenic (for those of you just now tuning in, here’s the first installation of On Eating at the Bar).

A friend works at a used book store in Berkeley, he’s a buyer, occasionally they get calls to buy whole estates, some old geezer just knocked off and the grandkids don’t know what to do with the four pallets of books Pops collected over the years. Anyway late one Saturday I get a text from Gary — need a favor, can you do a buy tomorrow, I'm not going to be able to make it — which I know from experience means Gary’s getting himself under the better half of a handle of Bacardi Limón and a twelver of Diet Coke and Sunday morning he’s not going anywhere.

Gary knows I know nothing about books, but I’ve joined him on these estate sale excursions in the past, I enjoy the voyeuristic deep dive, and he assures me I can just pay by the pound. So I drive out to North Beach and fight for parking, head up a tight creaky staircase to number 314. The place is pretty well cleaned out, the estate agents had already been through. I’m the first to get at the books though, ten or twelve wine boxes on the floor full of books, the naked shelves showing sun-bleached outlines of their former contents. “In vino veritas” reads the M&K wine shop label slapped on the re-purposed cases of Neuf de Pap.

I pay the grandson? nephew? by the case after assuring him I’ll take everything, carry the boxes down the three flights to the station wagon, then head home. I sort through the books, mostly fiction, some military history, 16 More Responses to the Ruy Lopez. What catches my attention though are a few dozen old cookbooks, all torn dust covers and swollen pages stuck together. I end up keeping these, packing up the others and dropping them off at Moe’s Books.

I forgot about the box for a couple weeks, a deadline at work kept me from doing the dishes much less digging through old cookbooks. Finally a lazy Sunday presented itself and I thought I’d make a lamb stew to last the week, so I start to thumb through some of the late Mr. Arsenic’s library in search of some much needed guidance. The real pearls I discover, though, aren’t the books themselves, but paper cocktail napkins, furiously scribbled upon in a barely legible scrawl. I could tell he’d fill up a side, then turn it over, write some more, then unfold, write some more, until all eight panels were covered so that the upside-down and right-to-left writing on the reverse would bleed through to the front.

The napkins themselves are undated, untitled. On each is self-contained essay on the act of eating, though curiously nothing on food itself, per se. One napkin will be a rant on the correct way to hold a fork, on another he’ll reflect on the simple power of a server’s smile.

In lieu of a proper McG, I’ve collected Mr. Arsenic’s napkins into a series that I, humbly, have entitled “On Eating at the Bar”. Next week we’ll pick up where we left off with installment number two, “Paying Attention”.