People always say "Oh I love the smell of a new book when you open it." I used to go along with this, nod wisely, say "Ah yes, nothing like it," but secretly I didn't agree.
I'm sure when I was young new books didn't have a particularly noticeable smell, certainly not one you could be addicted to. Perhaps in those far-off times of natural inks and relatively natural paper they didn't, and the smell we associate with a new book now, like the "smell of a new car," is actually a nasty compound of all kinds of modern carcinogenic compounds.
I didn't really get all that many new books anyway, except as Xmas and Birthday presents. The rest of the year I trooped off to the public library and borrowed more books and trooped home again (a distance of several miles each way). The library was like Aladdin's cave, but did have its disadvantages. I still remember the desperation as I finished the first volume of Lord of the Rings in a three-volume set only to find volume two missing when I returned, craving the continuation of the adventure. In addition on Saturday when I went to the afternoon film matinee (Hopalong and Roy and the rest; lots of cliffhangers, and bridgehangers and towerhangers; and narrow escapes from runaway trains and landslides) I would buy, very cheaply, secondhand books from a little shop next to the cinema. The problem with that was the condition of the books, and I still angrily remember, some 60 years later, reading to the second last page of a book I was really enjoying only to discover that the last page had been torn out by some juvenile delinquent of a previous owner. These are the things that try men's souls.
Anyway, for me, books were characterised not by smell but by look and feel. The large format, highly illustrated, thin children's books, gave way to chunkier normal books like grown-ups had. A thick book with small type promised a long story to live in (and you could tell, anxiously, as you approached the end of a story, how far there was to go by the thickness of pages held between fingers of your right hand). Paperbacks gave a feeling of being based in the modern world. On the book shelf I could recognise the look of old book friends, as surely as I could human friends in playground or shop.
Article comments