Do you have a pristine first edition Joy of Cooking or Mastering the Art of French Cooking in your collection? Or perhaps some older or more rare volumes? If so, you could be sitting on a gold mine, according to a recent article about vintage cookbooks. Says Nicole Sawyer, the co-founder of Chattic.com, an online community and marketplace for collectibles, "cookbooks are an enormous collectible category with immense value potential."

"Cookbooks can have auction potential, especially if they are rare, valuable, or have historical significance," said Sawyer. "Some vintage cookbooks can fetch high prices at auction, particularly those that are in excellent condition and have a strong provenance." Extremely old books, books by celebrity chefs, and even cookbooks once owned by famous people, command the highest prices.

The auction house Christie’s sold "Cookbook of the Pope’s Secret Chef" (c. 1570) by Italian chef Bartolomeo Scappi for $18,750 a few years ago. A first edition of Jacques Pépin's1976 book La Technique: An Illustrated Guide to the Fundamental Techniques of Cooking is currently listed for $1,000 on eBay (the article got the title of the book wrong). Sets of rare or vintage books have also sold for tens of thousands of dollars at auction.

I don't own any extremely rare or valuable cookbooks, but I now consider my $2 copy of La Technique to be a real bargain. Even if I did own anything worth a lot of money, I'm not interested in selling my cookbooks for a profit as I don't collect books for their monetary worth but rather for their value in providing me inspiration or teaching me new techniques.