Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell… musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is… it has no texture, no context. It’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um… smelly
Giles in “I Robot, You Jane“.
One of my favourite Buffy speeches, it’s now no longer a problem. (hat tip)
…And why has Smell-O-Vision not taken its rightful place in our modern world?
The government and the Illuminati have suppressed its manufacture and distribution in accordance with the wishes of Big Entertainment, that’s why!!!!?!?! (!!!)
You obviously didn’t scratch No 4 on the Smell-o-rama card during John Waters’ Polyester… you should be very grateful it has not taken its rightful place. Very grateful. Trust me.
Well, I got some old books on my bookshelf, quite a few over 50 years old and one, John Drinkwater’s A History of the Siege of Gibraltar, publisahed in 1905. (Couldn’t get the 1st edition – it cost thousands, literally.)
What Smellerbook forgets is the look of books – My edition of the American Journal of Ambrose Serle, published in 1940, had to have every page cut with a paper knife before the original owner could read it. My edition of Letters of a Loyalist Lady, by Ann Hulton, originally published by Oxford in 1927 has a marbled cover and dark brown spine with gold embossed letters – in fact, all three books have gold embossed letters – and they’re just books I’ve taken off my shelves at random. That lok and feel of book persists today, even with paperbacks. I’ve just been admiring the lovely black cover with gold title of Piers Mackesy’s The War For America 1775-1783 – because I’m using it at the moment. It has a lovely reproduction of Howard Pyle’s The Battle of Bunker Hill from Scribner’s Magazine 1898 (though that’s a bit of a cheat as Mackesy hardly mentions Bunker Hill.)
Just think of all those Penguin Classics with their front covers illustrated with contemporary illustrations and paintings.
Or the smell of old newspapers as you go through print editions in livrarey archives. And the look and feel of them.
Jeez, you really got me going now.
Just take a cold shower, Paul. You’ll be right in a bit.
That’s how I get in the mathematics section of the Barr-Smith Library, by the way …
David Irving (no relation)@ 4,
It’s winter, mate.
Well, yes, but you were getting a bit … err … excited, Paul.
I’ve been known to wax lyrical over books; even spent prize money buying them (I was lucky enough to be around when every newspaper, weekly, kids mag etc offered prizes for writing & drawing (or certificates if one was an ABC Argonaut – wern’t we all in the 50s). As the prize money improved, I sank it into ones illustrated by Arthur Rackman (Ingolsby, Lamb’s Tales) and other fine Art Nouveau illustrators. Chance (pre-Google)finds included a(n almost complete, 1st ed) $25.00 book of views – the first ever with steel engravings (a fraction of the cost of copper) – by William Westall, unlucky artist on Flinders’ Investigator; that a fairly new Google entry William Westall (Artist) describes as Great Britain Illustrated” (1830) which includes descriptions by Thomas Moule of 118 steel engravings after W.Westall went into several editions … actually, it’s prefaced by an ever so florid (& hilarious) paean to the use of steel engravings.
All these books, from C18 onwards, many now valuable tho the most I paid was a £100 prize (Ingolsby Legends) – the best now coocooned in unbleached calico in a trunk in secure storage – all have one now-intrinsic thing in common with one another & the relics of my first half century: They stink! Few of them were ‘sooked’ from Day 1; sweaty paws have turned their pages for a century or more spent in Qld’s humidity (protected from foxing with powder that doesn’t improve the smell) and ubiquitous mosquito coils. I’ve just flicked through a beloved 1908 Blackie’s illustrated “Tale of Two Cities” belonging to an uncle killed in the Second Battle of Messines (1917 – My 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month every year read, and it’s a hand-wash job!
I love the words; I love the pics; I love the bindings, especially lavishly gilded Victorian “the year in art” style volumes with chased & buffed gold page edging – even the few (often bound galley prints) with torn edges – I love what their contents do to my imagination. But the objects themselves – now too heavy to hold up in bed; pages difficult for arthritic fingers to turn; the light needed to read them too bright for OH to sleep… and I can’t “zoom in” the print – are just objects.
I have no Romantic feelings towards books (especially now there’s a better technology) any more than I do for pencils, pens (even fountain pend) & inks, copper boilers, clothes props, ice chests, horse troughs, “Mother Potts” irons, wood stoves, ECs, dirt roads, deep gutters full of taddies … Give me my trusty laptop any day! (Though illuminated vellum manuscripts are another story).
I love books. I remember travelling in Spain with a borrowed paperback copy of a 1960 collection of Orwell essays “the Decline of the English Murder” It was so cool to be able to dip in to that world complete with musty smell of old paperback and then have cerveza and tapas in the outside world. My children do not seem have the same feeling about books poor fellas…
I travel with T. S. Eliot’s poetry. I don’t know what first fascinated me about my first love (The Wasteland)- probably the multiplicity and depth of allusions, so that every reading was different, deeper, as I solved more of its riddles. The Four Quartets’ initial appeal was to my love of Marcus Aurelius, especially his constant search for the new, and of Einstein’s time theory; but appeal soon crystalised into identification of a philosophy I’d first discovered In Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – paradigms’ tendency to bind the mind and blind it to different explanations:
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been …
In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
In times of great change, the past is no longer a guide to the future.
I quasi-inherited from my grandparents some interesting, obscure, and forgotten works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries — most have been damaged through use and storage over the years, though.
“East Lynne” is probably the best-known of the books: a famous and rather ludicrous melodrama.
Then there’s my 1892 edition of “The Boy’s Own Book Of Indoor Games and Recreations”, which includes a rather bloodthirsty introduction to taxidermy (“…and now for the head of a horned animal…”) and a rather intricate introduction to model railways, in which the plucky 13-year-old reader gains instructions to build from scratch his very own live steam locomotive and the track to run it on.
Yorkshire Ditties, as well as Dialect comes from the pen of the Reverend John Hartley, an obscure country vicar who was also the 1879 Wimbledon Mens Singles Tennis Champion. Dialect is written in fluent Geordie, which makes it a bit like trying to read a modern work that’s been translated into Chaucerian English via Low German.
Oh, and over the course of 25 years, I have managed to collect a complete set of Bean’s History of Australia in The War of 1914-1, whilst the top of a wardrobe holds three months’ worth of the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin from 1884.
I grew up surrounded by thousands of books ranging from my dad’s 1677 copy of the Odyssey (Ulyffes) to all the newer books I constantly blow a large part of my budget on. The best thing about university was the library.
And I have to say, books are really annoying as a medium. They gather dust and are difficult to clean. They weigh staggering amounts, particularly when they’re in hardback. Hardback makes them sell for higher prices as well, which might be good if it had a sturdiness dividend, but they are the most precious little things. I don’t like damp, I don’t like sunlight. Don’t open me too much to see my content because I’ll fall apart.
These drawbacks were all well and good when owning books signalled wealth as much as it did learning, since the plebs couldn’t maintain a house that catered to the delicate needs of the book, but now it’s just an irritation.
They’re the worst way to present text except for scrolls, clay tablets, rune inscriptions, tomb walls, papyrus, computer screens and e-book readers as they currently stand.
Stupid books…
What is it about Buffy? I’ve just never klicked!
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True about the smell of books. That’s why the second-hand stores are so cool. Especially mixed with the smell of roast coffee beans.
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Strong coffee and a well-travelled copy of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite or an old edition of Euripedes. Mmmmmmm.
There is absolutely no smell associated with watching Buffy.
How many nuts did you get Mr T?
“And I have to say, books are really annoying as a medium.”
But they do furnish a room.
Was lucky enough to be sent to Cambridge (UK) for training.
Walked into the antiquarian bookstore of one G.David…….the smell, the books, the lithographic prints.
Could’ve spent 10 grand (Stg) in the first 5 minutes.
Spotted Johnsons Dictionary and had a “Blackadder Moment” (can anyone say Aardvaark?).
Ended up with some frightening books on electrical experiments written in the early-mid 1800′s (picture a person with appropriate moustache using a headlamp based on the carbon-arc principle!).
A chemistry book from 1910 still smelt distinctly of formaldehyde and had some Prussian Blue stains left on the second page.
Ideally, retirement will consist of a massive library in recycled timber containing many books on many topics with an avaerage age of 100 years ago. Add in some good wines and combine the smells…
Especially coffee-table books, Nabokov. If I recall Rod Quantok’s line in Australia, You’re Standing In It from many years ago, if you screw a leg into each corner of a coffee-table book, you get a coffee-table.