How old are your books?

If you don’t read paper books you won’t know what I’m talking about, I’m sorry. If you do read paper books you will know what I mean when I say- that old book smell.

I love that old book smell. It’s the oils, and must, and smoke of years of reading, and years of sitting on shelves in concert with their other shelf-mates. One of my favorite past-times is perusing used bookstores for my next acquisition. Well, this is usually a giant load of books. I think I spent over $1,000 last year on used books, and it was totally worth it. Have I gotten through them all? Not quite, but most of them.

There’s a goal- I want my library to smell like that. No, not like a used bookstore that smells mildewey and oddly of toilet cleaning chemicals. I mean that delicious smell of toasted cavendish, old book pages, and a nice hot cup of tea.

That’s the dream anyway, but at the very least the tea and the tobacco smell will be there. These are the kinds of intangible things that, if you sit there and absorb them all you will never be the same. I know, it may sound a bit silly, but life is very empty without silliness and fantasy. We have all of these lovely things to escape reality which, if we let it, can be oppressive and exhausting. These little things, a few of which I have mentioned, are what break up the monotony of reality and help us recharge our batteries to face it.

Of course, this leads me to my next question. How old are your books? I have a book that was published in 1887. I know it isn’t the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it’s the best I could afford. It smells of aged papers, decomposing binding, and ever so slightly of smoke and tobacco. I love it! It has a secret past and history that I’ll never know. It’s like grabbing a stone off the river floor. You don’t know how long it’s been there. Maybe it traveled down the river from higher up on the mountain; or maybe it tumbled down that mountain in an avalanche or rock slide. Perhaps it was as simple as tumbling down on its own after being slowly worked off by the rain and snow. Maybe it’s a combination of all of those things.

On a microcosm level, and I do mean micro-microcosm, these books have been through the same thing. Maybe that old book that smells so lovely was someone’s favorite growing up (see the previous week’s post). Maybe it was a book that was handed down from one generation to the next, like an old Bible. Maybe like me, you like to rescue old books from the inevitable scrap pile that comes from staying on a used bookstore’s shelf for too long. Whatever the case may be, you can be sure they have a tiny little history all of their own, and all manner of different pollen and dust on them from everywhere they’ve been.

And maybe, just maybe, that old book without a summary on the back, without any pictures in it; that book that smells musty and a bit like your grandma’s attic will be just the story you needed to get through that rough month or year that you’ve been having at work or in your personal life. If nothing else you gave it a shot and that little sense of accomplishment should help you carry on carrying on. Cheers to old books!!!!