Jan Langone, a diligent food scholar who started a mail-order cookbook business from her basement that grew into one of the nation’s great cookbook collections, died August 3 in Ann Arbor, MI. She was 89.

In her lifetime, she collected food-related books and ephemera, including the nation’s first cookbook, American Cookery, written by Amelia Simmons and published in 1796. She also secured a 1971 text believed to be the nation’s first Jewish cookbook.

Ms. Longone’s collection, nearly 25,000 items strong, became the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan and the antecedent for dozens of other culinary libraries. Ruth Reichl, who presided over Gourmet from 1999 to 2009, said Ms. Longone was one of the first to understand the power of history told through the lens of cooks. “She knew the value of looking at cookbooks unmitigated by a historian’s perspective,” Ruth Reichl said.

Despite her generosity with cooking information, Ms. Longone was tight-lipped about her sources. But she always gave would-be collectors the same advice: “When you see something you want, buy it. I’ve been guilty of this mistake myself. I never regret the things I’ve bought, but I do regret some things I didn’t buy.”