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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Old Books Smell Good

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12:35 / 17.08.05

I'm seconding green penguins. I recently brought a green Penguin mug 'cause I love 'em so much.

Mines the Big Sleep.

14:04 / 17.08.05

For several fantastic seconds there I thought those were tins of paint!

15:58 / 17.08.05

I can spend hours lost in 2nd hand book shops, just wandering around. Loomis, those covers are fantastic, I have the animal farm one and the 1984 modern classic's from Penguin (as well as some others). My mate has a complete set of Graham Greene Penguin Orange (I've only got a couple - including a 1939 edition of The Darin Young Man On The Flying Trapeze - William Saroyan which was a gift from a friend of mine who I seem to see about once a year, but who I always receive books in the post from). I haven't seen the green ones before though.

I've got a set of the Illuminatus! Trilogy, the three seperate books from the 1970's with fantastic sci-fi style covers, and managed to get a copy of Splinter in the Mind's Eye for 99p recently.

22:41 / 17.08.05

Working in the bookshop today i bought a 23 vol Unabridged set of the Kabbalistic writings 'The Zohar' from the Mail on Sunday journalist who wrote the big 'Evil Kabbalah Sect' piece that was in that paper a few months ago. She moaned that she had to shell out £150 for it when she went undercover to expose the cult but she did get to meet Madonna in a shed (?). I gave her £15 for the lot and said that it was always hard to give money to a large organization that took money off people in order to propagate its own biased and small minded point of view. I think that went a bit over her head though.

Don?t know what I?m going to do with it though. £80 anyone?

03:36 / 18.08.05

I got a mint first edition of both volumes of FWH Myers's Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death for twenty-five Canadian dollars - a price so low I smirked the whole time from putting them into brown paper at the shop to putting them on my shelf at home; whereupon I began the clapping and hooting.

18:33 / 23.10.06

At Value Village or The Salvation Army (I can't remember, it was a blur), I got a first fucking edition of Bret Easton Ellis' Glamorama, in beautiful condition. It comes with a dust jacket with holes on it, so you can see the celebrity faces printed on the glossy cover of the book. Designed by Chip Kidd, no less.

I love used books. I love the bargains. I love the hunting.

20:02 / 23.10.06

Smells of dripping: L Saulnier's Le Repetoire de la Cuisine has larks and blackbirds and thrushes galore, often with sauce Bigarrade.

Smells of the Continent: bargain box-set of Elizabeth David's finest from 1965 which includes, amusingly, an advert for a book by Professor John Yudkin and Gweneth M. Chappell, scientistes of grub, who recommend their slimming diet "based on the principle of cutting down as much as possible the intake of carbohydrates, replacing them with meat, fish, eggs and all the other protein-giving foods." Ahh, fashion.

Smells of the Nursery: Piggly Plays Truant (and who can blame him) for just 20p, very recently. I still have my original battered copy, but you can never have too much Piggly.

21:32 / 23.10.06

MMmmm, fusty books. We have a small but perfectly formed second hand section in work but we mostly sell new books. My favourite thing is opening an old book and finding some fossilised moment from another life the book has rubbed up against.

I found a British Rail ticket for a day return to London (from The Pool) that had had the destination crossed out and overwriten with New York. It was dated 1981, year of riots, unemployment and fucking new romantics. It made me smile.

I have found notes and receipts, article clippings and small ads, lists of page references and essay titles, photoboth photoes, names and addresses, sucessively crossed out and replaced, evidence of a books wonton infidelity.

Books obviously cherished, falling to bits, pages missing. I salute them as fallen heroes; their work here being done.

I always mistrust an old book in good nick. I suspect that it has been recently liberated, finaly released and free, though improbably pristine, after a hermitic life on some shelf, somewhere.

Books and money should remain in circulation for them to fulfill their full potential. I am a self confessed 'liberator' of books. For years I stole books at parties, untill I lifted a copy of something by Satre in french and thought that it might be a hint to pack it in.

I am also a pathological giver of books. I beleive books 'wink' at the owners that deserve them until they get picked up. If someone takes an interest in a book in my home it generally gets to be theirs. I stopped years ago from trying to keep track of roaming books, I got sick of feeling resentful and gave them away in good heart, but started stealing them too. It pleases me to think that I have my own bookcrossing thang going, without the bookplates and blogs, just quietly chucking ace literature and nonfiction randomly into the place that generates funny coincidences and perfect timings.

09:49 / 24.10.06

I actually have a minor-league addiction, to the extent that friends and relatives are all on call to stop me wigging out in proximity of any 2nd hand places.

My sexiest buys have been a 2nd edition Jane Eyre, a lovely 60s Terminal Beach and a Collected drawings of Mervyn Peake which is so scrummy I can barely bring myself to turn the pages.

14:29 / 02.11.06

I bought this odd book for £1

It's called Rebus and writing on the front is gold on a thick gray cover. It almost looks handmade. It's called REBUS by Sergei Bugaev. Itis a limited edition of 1500 copies and has two posters in a brown envelopes with something like this printed on:

Closed for Business Time

14:42 / 02.11.06

Trying to work out what liquid, foodstuff or substance unknown made those oh so suggestive stains on that particular page, right next to that particular paragraph. What was it that happened at that moment to that page? Was there altercation, interruption, lovemaking, inattentive boredom, vandalism, a sudden croak and taking ill? Sometimes I think of 2nd-hand book stains as Rorschach blots that hint to someone else's life.

14:46 / 02.11.06

Here it is

Although mine is minus the copper plate and spine, it still has lots of pretty pictures.

20:20 / 28.11.06

I believe that this topic is the correct venue to ask this:

How would I make my own bookends?

I live in a college dorm, and am fortunate enough to possess a large windowsill and many graphic novels (and even some "real" ones!). They're all old and browned from years of repeated reading, and absolutely perfectly located underneath my view of the Boston Common.

I actually just returned from a trip to several local bookstores to buy more. I picked up Eisner's "Sequential Art" and McCloud's new "Making Comics." I also snatched the graphic novel version of the Fountain, Ex Machina vol.1, and Top 10: Smax. I truly love purchasing them as they always smell of crisp ink and paper, especially the higher quality ones. Over time they begin to yellow and brown a bit but overall the printing process retains much of the color and beauty. Some of my volumes, such as Alan Moore's entire Swamp Thing run, actually become more defined as time goes by.

The only problem is that I have no large weights to support my row of books (I know there are valid differences between a comic and a novel, but for simplicity's sake they are all books). I searched three bookstores and could not find a single bookend or even a paperweight. Can anyone help me out?

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