Old Friends by Kate Lord Brown

VELLICHOR: n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Of all the things I miss in the desert, libraries and second hand book stores are high on the list. I miss everything about them - the serendipity of finding an out of print book which you didn't know you needed, or precisely the book you had been looking for for ages. I like to think of the people who've read the books before you. It's almost like their ghosts are watching over your shoulder as you browse the stacks, tapping you on the shoulder when you reach the book you need. It doesn't suit everyone. In London I spent most lunch hours writing in Chelsea Library, but the secretary in the gallery had a pathological hatred of old books (I think based on the germs she imagined they harboured). Am I imagining it, or did old library books have stamps in them about alerting the librarian if someone with a contagious disease had handled the book? Perhaps this was the root of her paranoia.

The smell of old books is a particular joy - grass, leather, almond, vanilla. It's caused by the breakdown of the compounds in the paper:

As a perfume junkie, I'm drawn to bookish smells - a current favourite is True Grace's 'Library' which is woody and smoky. One I'm dying to try is Brosius' 'In the Library', 'a warm blend of English Novel*, Russian & Moroccan Leather Bindings, Worn Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish.' He said:

"The main note in this scent was copied from one of my favorite novels originally published in 1927. I happened to find a signed first edition in pristine condition many years ago in London. I was more than a little excited because there were only ever a hundred of these in the first place. It had a marvellous warm woody slightly sweet smell and I set about immediately to bottle it."

Last time we were home, I managed to find a less than pristine first edition of an old favourite. Are there books you have multiple copies of? There are copies of 'The Leopard' in storage in two places, plus a recent Vintage reissue here, but I still couldn't resist this battered old friend with its 'withdrawn' stamps from 'John Orr's Lending Library'. Flicking through the pages in the desert, the smell transports me back to the old bookstore by the river, and the words to the first time I read it in Chelsea library twenty five years ago. Books really are magic, aren't they?

Favourite Finds by Joan Lennon

Charity shops - second-hand bookstores - you never know what you might stumble across in them.  Books you didn't even know existed but that still somehow manage to draw your eye from in amongst all the other titles on display.  I'd like to tell you about just one of the books that did that to me, and now lives on my own book shelves:

Peter Goodfellow's Shakespeare's Birds 

illustrated by Peter Hayman

published in 1983 by Kestrel Books

This is not an earth-shattering book.  It is not a weighty, academic study.  It is gentle and unassuming, with the flavour of a pleasant conversation about it.  

The illustrations are detailed and thoughtful.

I learned some stuff I didn't know - like, for example, some of the old country names for birds, such as ouzel for blackbird, throstle for song thrush and puttock for the red kite.  Some of the conventions and stories Shakespeare would have drawn on in his use of bird imagery I knew, such as the swan who only sings as she dies, or the barnacle goose being born from barnacles and therefore being okay to eat during Lent (because it was technically a fish ...)  But others were new to me - the kingfisher, for example (known as the halcyon as in halcyon days) was thought to build its nest out of fish-bones, floating on a calm sea.  And a dead owl, nailed over a door, kept evil away.  

But it isn't at heart an I'm-going-to-teach-you-stuff book.  What it boils down to is, Goodfellow really likes birds, and he really likes Shakespeare, and he hopes you do too.  And the one thing Shakespeare's Birds achieved above everything else was to remind me of just how utterly mellifluous the plays and sonnets are.  It made me want to go back and re-read them.

So thank you to the second-hand bookshop I found this book in, and here's to many more pleasant surprises in the future.  What would I quite like to find next?  Well, J.E. Harting's The Ornithology of Shakespeare critically examined, explained and illustrated, published in 1871, and listed in Goodfellow's "Suggestions for Further Reading" would be nice.*

And how about you?  Tell us about your favourite finds, in the random and serendipitous world of charity and second-hand bookshops - the books you maybe didn't even know existed, that now have a new home on your book shelves.


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.


(*After typing those words I had a bash at googling Harting's book and lo and behold, I can read it on the Guggenheim online archive here - so that's my distraction for the day organised, without even leaving the house!)