Celia Sack first came to West Marin to visit friends. For several years, she and her wife, Paula, would spend weekends with friends or swap their apartment in San Francisco for places in Tomales. In 2001, they bought a house originally built for railroad workers in 1874 and now they visit as often as they can, taking the opportunity to recharge and always keeping a jigsaw puzzle in process on the living-room table.
Celia owns Omnivore Books, San Francisco’s Noe Valley cookbook store. Featuring new and antiquarian titles, the shop has become a destination for avid cooks, serious collectors, those curious to learn new skills and people just searching for something different to prepare for dinner. The shop’s selection covers a broad and deep range, not only books that are trending. Titles tightly pack the shelves and are stacked on every inch of available table space. Despite this, Celia can go right to any book you request. If you’re not sure what you want, she’ll ask a few questions and provide several alternatives. It’s the kind of place where you can spend hours browsing and feel you have been there mere minutes.
Celia’s enthusiasm for books is joyously palpable. She knows that a good cookbook can be a window into culture and people, not simply a compilation of recipes. Her author events are popular, well attended and usually free of charge. April will include appearances by Trevor Fletcher (“San Francisco Cocktails”), Eric Kim (“Korean American”) and others. Celia loves to discover antiquarian books—her passion—and sell them to customers who will appreciate them as much as she does. It’s fine with her if a book sits on a shelf for years in wait for the right buyer.
Celia was born in Jacksonville, Fla., but her parents moved the family to San Francisco to raise Celia and her sister in a more liberal city. At Sarah Lawrence College, Celia majored in literature and regularly took the train to New York City to work part-time at Christie’s auction house, where she focused on 19th-century European paintings.
After graduating, Celia returned to the West Coast and from time to time attended book fairs with a friend who worked for Albatross Books. She soon became enamored with antiquarian books and went on to work for Pacific Book Auction Galleries, which buys and sells rare books, manuscripts, autographs, maps and photographs. She’d travel across the Bay Area to evaluate and buy people’s book collections on consignment.
During her time there, she became an authority on angling books from the 16th century and became the West Coast expert on rare golf books (she finds the history of golf fascinating but has never played and she has never fished, though she loves to eat fish). In her personal library, she has letters written during the Gold Rush and the Civil War and some of Henry Miller’s diaries. Among her favorite old food books is one that describes how to set up retail butcher displays in Victorian England. Another, from 1859, explains the psychology of retail, much of which she says holds true today.
After seven years working for an auction house, Celia needed something more visceral, and she joined Paula’s dog walking business. Together they built up a company that employed several walkers, and later they opened Noe Valley Pet Company, which sells practical and upscale animal needs and wants. (They also sell cat litter at the same price as big box stores, saying there’s no reason people shouldn’t be able to buy litter in an attractive environment.)
On a rickety plane ride over Costa Rica while vacationing in 2008, Celia had an epiphany: she would turn the pet store’s storage room into a cookbook store. Omnivore Books was born. During the last two years, Celia put her entire inventory on her website, www.omnivorebooks.com, giving customers the convenience of ordering online while still supporting a small independent business. During the pandemic, she kept Julie Martinoni, the now-retired Tomales postal worker, busy as she came in with packages of books by the trunkful. Celia even made this paper’s Sheriff’s Calls—a feat of which she is quite proud, with a copy of the call posted on her refrigerator—for tripping and making a swan dive onto the floor of the post office lobby. She broke her ankle, and paramedics were called.
Celia is always cooking and searching for good food, both in books and at restaurants. Below is a recipe she likes to cook in Tomales after a visit to Hog Island Oyster Company.