I love the smell of old books.
A book with a history always developes the same type of fragrance. Sure sometimes you can scent the edgy moldnes that came from damp storaging, and yes not so rarely you get the full bodied tobacco flavours, but most of the time, the books with calm memories of nonturbulent aging, and especially papebacks, develop a soft pensive sweet smell. It allways reminds me of the nice moments when I was able to tuck my knees under a soft blanekt with a cup of cinnement tea in one hand and a light piece of someone else’s thoughts in the other.
I was just taken back to this cosy confession moment every “common reader” knows and shares by my first non-italian dictionary.
The New Expanded Webster’s Dictionary with “over 360.000 words and meanings” copyrighted in 1988. I was looking for a handy term to distishinguish between different deer-like quadrupeds and their female associates (quite unsucessfully, since Webster himself was obviously not a man of Nature) in order to start work on my doe-vampire theory of female behaviour, when I got caught up in the old books smell Kenzo once transplanted into a very nice eau de cologne for men. Then I saw it, the Larousse de poche from 1954.
I just love my bookshelf.
