Smell of a Book

[alanajoli]

Earlier today I commented on sartorias's recent post about keeping old books. I'm not particularly sentimental about my books (though the ones that are signed--whether by my children's librarian growing up from books I won during summer reading or by the authors--are certainly special). When a book gets old, I replace it. Nearly five years of working at bookstores trained me to think that old books, beat-up shouldn't be read. (In some cases, this is for their own protection; we recently replaced an old copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology that was falling apart at the spine. It's still on the shelf, but we have a shiny new copy to refer to without having to worry about losing pages.)

On the other hand, I love physical books. I love how they look on the shelf. I loved seeing my first novel in print, feeling its weight, having a friend heft it and then ask if there were pictures. (Thanks to the lovely and talented Lindsay Archer, I could say yes. He didn't believe me, and I had to flip through to show him the insets.) And, as Giles once said on Buffy, books smell. I recently got a new dictionary because it was required for a copyediting assignment I'm working on. Possibly the most fun I've had in this assignment is opening up the dictionary and flipping through the pages, having that new-book-smell of paper and book glue waft up as I found the answers to my questions (and got distracted by words like "emissary," which I didn't realize could mean not only messenger, but secret agent).

I love content posted online, but find that I read comics better online than prose. I've only ever made it through one e-book without printing it. (This was a novel by the aforementioned sartorias, who didn't say it was a novel when she posted it on Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch Day, so I was fooled into thinking it was a short story. By the time I realized, it was too late, and I'd been utterly sucked in. Given how much I enjoyed it, I'm not complaining.) At this point, however, I think I read maybe fifteen web comics, most of them cohorts on DrunkDuck whose authors or artists have found us over at Cowboys and Aliens. As much as I enjoy the serial nature of the stories... it'd be nice to sit down with them away from the screen. Which I suppose explains Rich Burlew's success with Order of the Stick in print: geeks like me like how books smell.

Comments

[dmoonfire.livejournal.com]

I love the smell of books. In my house, the smell of the books is the history. My oldest books smell strongly of incense while the new ones smell of glue and paper. As I read and re-read them, they gain more of their scents from the life I'm living. Since my tastes in incense and oils have changed over the years, I can pick up a book and just smell the paper, remembering what I was doing or where I picked up the book.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I really liked Cowboys and Aliens. Went from beginning to end and I really enjoyed it, must better than what I'm producing in a comic.

I get the hardcopy version of comics that I enjoy. I do it for a couple of reasons, the first being a way of supporting those comics I just happen to enjoy. The other is because I like the feel of paper. Plus, I can read it in bed or sprawled out on the couch. Paper doesn't crash and I don't have to worry about a misbehaving UPS taking out everything. Paper, unlike my computers, hasn't gone obsolete in the last couple of decades, so I feel it is a "reliable" medium.

Now, I don't throw away books. Well, I do if they are ruined (damn cats). Most of the time, I find myself going back to my little library at home and picking up a random book, already knowing how it will end, but just wanting a comfortable time with the scents of incense and good stories. :)

If you can't tell, we burn a lot of incense in our house. Some of our friends tell us that they can always find our dogs because their fur smells of it. :D

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying it. We're looking forward to getting back to the narrative next week. (The concept art has been fun... but since I didn't work on any of it, I'm feeling left out! *g*)

Plus, I can read it in bed or sprawled out on the couch.

Amen.

If you can't tell, we burn a lot of incense in our house.

Out of curiosity, can you tell about when you bought the book based on what incense you were using at the time? :) I don't notice a particular smell to the books that have been with me since college, or the books I got joint ownership of when I got married. The ones that still retain memory smell are the ones from my parents' house; they brought out a couple of boxes of my stuff last October. Lois Lowry's Number the Stars in particular has the smell of the bedroom where I lived until I was sixteen.

[dmoonfire.livejournal.com]

Oh sure. When I was in high school and a few years after (17 to about 20), I was heavy into sandalwood incense. So, most of my books during that period have the scent of sandalwood, which includes most of my religious studies and philosophy books. Near the end of that, I started enjoying pacholui (can't spell it though) a lot, so there was a slightly spicier smell to the books from around that period (which was only a year or so). During my time in Iowa, I enjoyed frankincense WAY too much, plus the house has a slightly musty smell to it, so my college books and a lot of my art books all smell like that. After I moved back to the Chicagoland, we started doing more mixed incense (after I got back with then married darkfluffy) with floral or fruit scents. So, I have a lot of programming books that smell of those and a few periods before that and almost all of my high science books have that scent. :)

Naturally, my gaming books and some of my older books have a synthesis of all of those scents, plus some of the books I got were from bookstores that used incense, so you get a flood of scents when you open up the bindings.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

*g*