Garlic, new cars, citrus, crackling firewood, manure*
C
Glue, bleach, paint, coffee, one’s own body odour
D
Manure*, wet dogs, other people’s body odour, cannabis, exhaust fumes
F
Cigarette smoke1, rotten eggs, cat piss, human waste
* Manure is in a curious superposition where it could probably occupy every tier at once.
On one hand, it smells like shit (because it is), but after so long living in the country, i
can’t help but find it refreshing to the senses. It’s the smell of having escaped the city —
the smell of Demeter!
When i was a bairn, my mam would take me to this great big bookstore in Amsterdam, just a hop and a
skip away from the city’s central plaza. It’s held a special place in my mind ever since. What burns
brightest in my memory, though, isn’t a book or an item of decor or an especially kind employee, but
a machine. On the top floor, around the corner from the gift shop, sat the shop’s on-demand printing
service.
Twenty-four hours a day, new pages would roll through its glass walls, printing and printing and
printing until a book was fully-formed. I don’t remember what was in these books, or what they
looked like — i was seven, give me a break — but i’ll be damned if i don’t remember that
smell. Freshly-stamped ink, that petrichor of paper, that which one can still catch a whiff
of in just-delivered magazines on one’s front porch.
All things must pass eventually, of course. Ink dries, paper cools, and before you know it, your
beautiful book smells like nothing at all. Yet in between the tiny strands of ground-up wood that
make it up, something else, something just as fragrant, is happening — and to understand the power
of that, we must head across the North Sea.
I’ve blogged about Barter Books before: the Mecca of second-hand books, housed in a comically
oversized railway station in Alnwick (built that way to the Duke of Northumberland’s specification).
It is, in no uncertain terms, one of the coziest places on earth, despite its immense size. Daylight
streams through the windows, and when none are to be found, artificial lights decorate the air with
a firey golden glow. The most important factor in its gezelligheid (to borrow a term) has
long eluded me, but i think i may have finally figured it out.
As books grow musty and yellow with age (a common condition second-hand), they, as any fule kno,
gain a certain odour, similar to and yet entirely different from “new book smell”. Crack open the
spine, and an earthy, wooden aroma wafts into the nose, with a slight hint of vanilla and an inkling
of all the people who’ve leafed through it before. When enough of these old books are in the same
place, the air becomes less like that of a building, and more like that of a forest — a way
of being outdoors without being outdoors.
