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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Old Books Smell Good

  
  

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Cat Chant
14:32 / 03.08.05
It seems so unlikely that Barbelith doesn't already have a thread for gloating over second-hand bargains and fetishizing the beauty of old books - their smell, their design (those beautiful Penguin paperbacks), the thick paper... But I couldn't find one, so I've started one.

It all started when Tangent and I dropped into the Mind shop and found a copy of The Complete Hothead Paisan for £3. Next, we went into Oxfam Books, where I found a tiny little hardback copy of Smith of Wootton Major (with illustrations for Pauline Baynes, who did the Narnia illustrations) for a friend and Claudine at St Clare's (the only St Clare's book we were missing) and Harriet the Spy for myself. Tangent spotted Passing for Normal, a memoir about someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette's syndrome, and I added it to the pile (I love memoirs about people's difficult lives).

Then I led Tangent by the hand to gaze upon the display of fourteen slightly obscure Wodehouse books (ie no Jeeves or Mulliner), the 1970s editions I mostly grew up with, with Ionicus covers and gorgeous title fonts; a mixture of some of my favourites with some of my less-favourites with some I've never read (or, in a couple of cases, heard of: Bachelors Anonymous sounds promising, though...). And she told me I should buy them ALL. So I did. (Do Butlers Burgle Banks?; Summer Moonshine; Piccadilly Jim; Spring Fever; Uncle Fred in the Springtime; Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin; The Little Nugget; Uneasy Money; Bachelors Anonymous; The Luck of the Bodkins; Money in the Bank; Eggs Beans and Crumpets; Big Money; and Laughing Gas.)

(Total cost: £39 for nineteen books. Not the cheapest haul ever, but you gotta pay for quality.)

Truly the universe smiles upon my kingship.
 
 
■
16:07 / 03.08.05
One of my favourite books ever was One Hundred Years of Solitude. Not necessarily for the story, but because my copy was an old yellowy/orange US edition which smelled of houses made from pine every time I opened it. I'd sniff it for minutes at a time. No wonder I couldn't work out what the hell was going on with Melquiades.
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
17:42 / 03.08.05
paperback copy of The Magus by John Fowles - it was the only book I bought for a reading list that looked like it could have come off of a wire rack at a bus station. I cherished it as being literature in pulp clothing.

dog-eared, yellow stains encroaching on the text from the edges of each page. It has a history greater than that of the tale contained within each letter.

and I liked the story.

cost me under $1 (canajun)

ttfn
tenix
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
20:22 / 03.08.05
a copy of The Complete Hothead Paisan for £3

Grr. feel my jealousie.

And, as someone who's probably read almost every Wodehouse novel, there are some crackers in there, including a pile of the 'Blandings' series, which are at least comparable to Jeeves/Wooster stuff in quality.

More later with my own gloats and some stuff on books as objects.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
20:28 / 03.08.05
I will be back tomorrow, when I will have more time and will, I hope, have stopped gnawing my knuckles in jealousy over Deva's Wodehouse scoop. Seriously, I'd expect to pay about £39 for those alone (and I remember second hand Jeeves being very cheap when I was younger. What changed?) However, I went to an excellent second hand bookshop over the weekend and got lots of lovely things, including but not limited to Big Money and Picadilly Jim. And the Penguin Dorothy Parker (with a cover doing 'Art Deco' like only the Seventies can) which I plan to savour along with my nightly glass of vermouth.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:49 / 03.08.05
For obvious reasons, my friends have a habit of giving me early editions of Venusberg by Anthony Powell.

I don't spend enough time thrifting at present, but just gave away a gorgeous Random House Ulysses (hardback, green, embossed). Happiest at present with the editions of Iliad and Odyssey I picked up (Lattimore and Fagles) for £15 at the Oxfam bookshop in the Laines in Brighton - solid, heavy, satisfying.
 
 
Mazarine
02:39 / 04.08.05
I've got a delicious little early 20th century copy of Paradise Lost that smells so bloody good. It's a security blanket of book.

The building I'll be spending most of the next two years in smells like old books all the time, as one would expect the library science building to do. So delicious.
 
 
Axolotl
08:11 / 04.08.05
I love old books and second-hand bookshops. Everything about them appeals, especially the smell - I love the smell of old books. A regular weekend routine for me is trawling the charity shops and second-hand bookshops for bargains.
The books that mean the most to me as objects are probably a set of Lovecraft paperbacks, the majority of which I inherited from my grandfather. The best bargain I ever got was a Frank Belknapp Long paperback from the 50s for 99p.
As an aside I found out recently that many second-hand booksellers hate the charity sector's expansion into book-selling, e.g. Oxfam Books. They consider that they have a double (unfair) advantage on not paying for stock and getting reduced rates.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
10:48 / 04.08.05
My favourite ever second hand book is one I got from my school library when they were selling off their older books for 10p each -it's a copy of the Pat Hobby Stories. The paper for the pages is beautiful and thick, almost hardback quality even though it's just a paperback, which is probably why it managed to remain in a school library for 20 years and not look at all manked about.

Last weekend, everything I bought that I've not already mentioned upthread was actually quite new, so it was more new-book-to-read joy rather than old-book joy. On the other hand, though, I also like second hand books with completely uncreased spines -might be the opposite of this thread, but there's something about the still going to be the first to read it! feeling...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
11:34 / 04.08.05
Ah, I knew there was something recent.

Copies of Jacqueline Wilson's 'Bad Girls' and 'Double Act' for 25p from a Shelter shop.

My favourite 'smelly' books are probably the Dorothy L Sayers I've found second-hand, often very old pocket editions. Lovely graphics and that wonderful aroma....
 
 
Loomis
11:50 / 04.08.05
Great thread Deva.

The vast majority of my books are second hand, and I used to spend hours and hours doing the rounds of all the good second hand book stores in Sydney. Unfortunately I don't do that so much these days, for a variety of reasons.

I like well-read books. Nothing finer than a really floppy old secondhand paperback, providing it's not actually damaged structurally. My all-time favourites are the Penguin Modern Classics. I don't have any handy to check when this particular series of them was published. I have some delicious Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury & Absalom! Absalom!) and also Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Also some old Hemingway and Conrad.

They're all on their way to me as we speak. Probably sitting in a depot in England at the moment.
 
 
Loomis
11:57 / 04.08.05
Can't find pics of the ones I want but these are the kind I'm talking about. How great are these covers?





  
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
12:31 / 04.08.05
Oh yeah, got a gorgeous leatherbound masssive purple monstrosity of Le Morte D'Arthur second hand in York about a decade ago. It has grown even more musty and pungent with time.

My mate got a gorgeous, mint condition copy of T.McKenna's True Hallucinations hardback first print, with this funky zig-zaggy effect in the page binding, and sweet sweet smell, too.

I've always loved the smell of books. Mmmmm, bisto.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:31 / 04.08.05
I love those Penguins... also the orange ones, which absolutely rule.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:33 / 04.08.05
Oh, I've also got a gloriously weathered compy of The Compete Golden Dawn System Of Magic, which was left at a house I used to live in by a guy who was moving out (several years later I bumped into him and he told me I was welcome to keep it). Thing is, we didn't know he'd left it behind until WE moved out, by which time, having been stored in the rickety conservatory, it had started to look a lot more like a tome, rather than just a big book. Cleaned it up a bit, and it looks ace.
 
 
Sax
12:59 / 04.08.05
I find that the internet has taken away a great joy of mine, to wit, spending hours and hours looking through second hand bookshops. Well, taken away in the way that the Heffalump took away Pooh's honey. I'm just lazy and office-bound and end up buying stuff on e-bay and amazon when ten years ago I would have gone to a second hand book shop. There was an absolutely fantastic one in Preston called, rather grandly, The Temple of the Muses, and it was just piled high with random selections of books. No thought was given to any kind of order, which made the experience all the more enjoyable because you had to sift through all the piles just browsing for whatever took your interest.

Any good shops in Leeds, Deva?
 
 
Loomis
13:06 / 04.08.05
I'm just lazy and office-bound and end up buying stuff on e-bay and amazon when ten years ago I would have gone to a second hand book shop.

Word to that. If someone mentions a book that sounds good, I hop onto ebay and before you know it the book's on its way to my door. Whereas back in the day I would keep a regularly updated list in my wallet of books I was looking for and would trawl all my favourite stores every week.
 
 
illmatic
13:12 / 04.08.05
Possibly my fave is my copy of Images & Oracles of Austin Spare which is one of the most beautifully designed books I know... Spare's artwork, lovely black and red printing and caligraphy, lots of Spare's cryptic epigraphs printed alongside the pictures. I'd be hard pushed to call it a bargin as it was £60, but that's with slight water damage and no dust jacket, otherwise it would've been £250!

You can see fragments of the artwork by paging down here.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
13:19 / 04.08.05
I love those Penguins... also the orange ones, which absolutely rule.

Penguin greens

Greens, dude. Greens all the way.
 
 
lord nuneaton savage
14:32 / 04.08.05
I've always been one for collecting books by particular publishing companies. You can't beat the rush of finding an item you've been after for ages to round off a collection.

The two main collections I have are of the NEL Skinhead series from the 70s (Skinhead, Sorts, Bootboys etc) and an ever growning collection of Savoy books (Manchester based Sci-fi publishers who I've been too lazy to start a thread about for ages). It looks fantastic having all the similarly designed and logoed spines neatly arranged next to each other on the shelf. Very satisfying.

(Incidentally if anyone sees/has a copy of David Britton's "Lord Horror" on Savoy pleeeeeease get in touch with me. I'm desperate)
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
10:23 / 05.08.05
No way, pal. I see that baby, it's mine.
 
 
ghadis
12:16 / 05.08.05
Lovely smelly books. I've been working in a second hand book and comic shop for about 10 months now and as someone whos idea of heaven is rumaging around in second hand book and comic shops it is one of my favourite jobs ever. Recent finds are Kenny Grants The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God (Outside the Circles of Time is on its way anytime now i can smell it!) Various Burroughs first editions and rarities and a wonderful 1960s hardback of Crowleys The Book of Thoth that actually smells like Crowley had it tucked under his arm when he died. All of them dirt cheap (which isn't suprising as i'm selling them to myself)

Britton's Lord Horror has passed through the shop a couple of times recently so i'll keep an eye out. Got a copy of DM Mitchells A Serious Life if either of you are interested.

Also got about 3 shelves of 60s Penguins at the moment. Green and Orange. Hooray for smelly books!!
 
 
DaveBCooper
13:03 / 05.08.05
Aside to those of you who love the Penguins and have access to London - there's an exhibition at the V&A about the history of Penguin books, including their design, from now until a few months hence. Not huge, from what I've heard (haven't seen it yet), but admission is free.
 
 
Saveloy
13:18 / 05.08.05
Coo, funny enough I was drooling over this only yesterday. {cartoon wolf whistle}

I think My Favourite Find has to be Admiral Rodney's Bantam Cock (1949). Was there ever a more promising title for a childrens' book? Well, maybe - on the back of the dust jacket is a list of other titles by the same publisher, and among them is listed 'Frolick Island'.

I'm currently reading it to my son at beddy-byes time. Only one and a half chapters in and we've already had the first stripping off of dripping wet clothes to run about on the beach "like naked savages". Hip hip hoorah!

And when I last left off the three young heroes were about to learn how harsh life is aboard a trading vessel in 1782...
 
 
Loomis
13:28 / 05.08.05
Thanks for the link Saveloy. That book looks just perfect. Straight onto the xmas list it goes, yes it does.
 
 
Axolotl
12:00 / 06.08.05
On my way home yesterday I helped someone move a fridge and in the process managed to score a bag of old sci-fi paperbacks: Half a dozen Theodore Sturgeon short story collections, a few Heinlein novels and some Harlan Ellison collections. And they were all free, mwahahahaha.
 
 
Cat Chant
14:11 / 06.08.05
Any good shops in Leeds, Deva?

Leeds isn't great for bookshops. There's a second-hand one just next to Kirkstall Morrison's, and there's a run of charity shops in Headingley (on, um, Otley Road) which consistently sell a fair range of books (ie not all chicklit), ranging from the Cancer Research shop (5 paperbacks for £1) to Oxfam Books (from around £1.99 per book). Oh, oh, oh, though, there's also Poverty Aid on Cardigan Road which has one million books for ridiculously cheap prices: I got a beautiful hard-back copy of this edition of The Poison Oracle



for, like, 50p. (The other jacket design is this manky old green thing.)

many second-hand booksellers hate the charity sector's expansion into book-selling, e.g. Oxfam Books

I can see their point with the specialist Oxfam-Books alphabetically-ordered sort of thing, but I think that shopping in proper, Bernard-Black-esque, second-hand-bookshops is a different kind of activity from rootling through the wire basket on the pavement to see if you can complete your set of Class of '84 for under a quid, and both can co-exist. (Sort of like paying for music vs free downloading - the kind of people who do the latter are more likely to do the former and EVERYONE WINS YAYY).

And speaking of:

if anyone sees/has a copy of David Britton's "Lord Horror" on Savoy pleeeeeease get in touch with me. I'm desperate

I don't know the book, I'm afraid, but I was wondering about having a central 'book swap' thread on Barbelith? There's already the joyous (and soon-to-be-revived now that I'm moving, come to think of it - I know I have a spare copy of Tendencies, for example) Free Books thread, but sometimes - like when I go to book fairs - it would be good to know if there are people who are after particular titles. I tend to pick up extra copies of Diana Wynne Jones novels whenever I see them, just in case I ever meet anyone who needs one, for example, so it would be good to be able to expand the policy in a slightly more directed way... Actually, I'll start the thread and continue this wibble there.
 
 
sleazenation
09:23 / 07.08.05
It has been too long since I frequented ramaindered and secondhand bookshops with any regularity, however yesterday I drunkenly popped into one at Nottinghill gate and found a lovely copy of John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel A History of Violence for three pounds - top graphic novel for chapness -bargain!
 
 
stml
12:44 / 11.08.05
Hey guys - just thought I'd point you towards this blog, which, among other rants, discusses the highs and lows of secondhand bookshopping in London, with particular eulogies reserved for those guys who sell books off blankets in the street...

I don't write it. Really I don't.
 
 
stml
12:54 / 11.08.05
Oh, and what I meant to say was... if y'all love Penguins like I love Penguins, you really, really need this book, Phil Baines' Penguin By Design, which lovingly (and not uncritically) surveys the various evolutions of the Big P. It's complete book porn.

And they're doing red ones next.
 
 
sleazenation
12:55 / 11.08.05
Spurred on by enjoyment of weekend bookshopping i had a rummage through the bookshops of charring cross road and was sorely disappointed. Ecclecticism has been replaced by specialization, and none of those specializations were what I was interested...
 
 
hapax legomenon
06:09 / 15.08.05
I love those Penguins... also the orange ones, which absolutely rule.

I wonder if the British were spared the beige rim that is the hallmark of the older North American Penguin editions. I, too, like used books, but I like our newer Penguins (black) much better.
 
 
OJ
14:34 / 16.08.05
It's the element of happenstance I love more than either finding a bargain (too lazy to ebay) or a first edition/rarity, which quite frankly, I wouldn't recognise.

I can still remember the joy of ferreting out two books at a stall on Chesterfield market in the very early 90s, aged about 18. To appreciate the magical discovery, you have to remember that t'internet was not available back then and that Chesterfield market is an archetypically provincial corner, where I just happened to be visiting at the time just to multiply the randomness element. Oh and that the tastes of a teenage girl may run slightly to hysteria.

The books were The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath in battered hardback, with a half-torn paper slip cover, a book of which I had heard but had never seen. And Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderos de Laclos - get this - in the original French. And, try not to swoon, with the pages uncut. I had never seen a book with uncut pages before and it just seemed so glamorous. Gush. [If you're into that sort of thing, insert lashings of Freud here.]

I'm not very good at remembering specific days that far back, but that one stood out as one that showed the world to be full of amazing possibilities. And I also think you have to be a teenager to see a Sylvia Plath novel or the opporunity to wield a paper-knife as the keys to the magic kingdom.

Recently I've not had any amazing finds, but it's always nice when the right book falls into your lap at the right time. There was a mini-haul of Penguin Euripides plays at one of those outdoor markets around Temple Bar in Dublin, just around the time that I was fancying reading some.

The Oxfam bookshop in York (Micklegate) seems to be good for literary/academic books, but is quite predictable. I got a nice edition of Audre Lorde poems there at the weekend. I'm not sure when the residents of York at large got so literate, I don't remember them always having been so. They also seemed very strong on LGB stuff, so maybe they god a job lot when Libertas! closed down.

An old Penguin (I think) of Billy Budd at a charity stall in Aberdaron carpark, right on the tip of the Llyn Peninsula seemed so appropriate I forced the bemused attndant to take £1 for it, instead of 50p.

All this being said, you'd think I'd be a great fan of Bookcrossing . But I'm not. It's laudable and I've promoted it in the past in various places, but I just can't get along with it myself. I just can't bring myself to "release" books that I love and it seems rather wrong to unleash books that you don't want because they're crap on an unsuspecting world. I'd like to point this out to whoever ensured that my first encounter with Bret Easton Ellis would be Glamorama....

ps. Yes, this is my first post on this board and it appears to be quite fulsome. Tell me nicely if you think it's too long.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
18:09 / 16.08.05
I can still remember the joy of ferreting out two books at a stall on Chesterfield market in the very early 90s, aged about 18.

Hah -this was my source of cheap PGW in my teenage years, I'd always go there for a week with my family in the summer. Never found anything as sexy as the Les Liaisons Dangereuses, though...

Another fantastic bookshop (more 'rare finds' than 'cheap things') I remember from family holidays was a place in, I think, Shrewsbury -there were several floors, and several staircases to each floor, and each staircase had several piles of books on it. It was also full of doors that looked like they led to store rooms, but in fact led to... more books. I think I bought a copy of Hard Times there, just because it seemed like the right thing to buy in such a Dickensian place.

(Sorry. A bit more about bookshops than books, that one)
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
10:49 / 17.08.05
The book, the bookshop... they are all part of the same thing... as a yoot I used regularly to dream of second-hand bookshops (which I would revisit in subsequent dreams) in which I would find elusive copies of Chalet School and other school stories, with dustjackets... I think this is because of a shop I once visited in Cecil Court which had tons of the things. The shop isn't there any longer (unless it was actually Marchpane, but I don't think so); but I don't like Cecil Court anyway, because everything comes in those wrapper-protectors and costs a week's wages, and you can check their catalogues on the internet and it's just not the same (it's not even the same as writing off for for books from catalogues you receive through the post). A secondhand bookshop isn't any good unless there's at least two piles of books on the floor.
 
  

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