The Tangled Branch Discussion Forums

Redolent

I bought a book about palmistry,
a fairly ancient book.
Black and white line drawings
showing different hands.
None quite like mine.
Thick coarse paper.

It sat on a rack outside the shop
and, as ancient books sometimes do,
it called to me as I passed.

I opened it at a few random pages,
noticed the 'foxed' edges
and a few handwritten notes
from the previous owner.
In erasable pencil,
so not total vandalism.

Fifteen minutes later I went inside,
to the familiar antiquarian book smell
and paid for it.

"I knew you'd be in,"
said the store owner.
A wizened little fellow,
cloned in bookshops worldwide.

I'd been home less than an hour
before the tobacco smell emerged.
Previously hidden by the outdoor cold,
and diesel fumes from the road,
but now released in my warm office.

Rolling slowly through my home,
slipping from room to room
like mist across an open field.

Good quality pipe tobacco I'd say,
not cheap ready-mades,
but still unwelcome in my home.
But I didn't want to dump the book.

So it hung on a string,
pages partially opened
and occasionally shuffled,
in my garage for several months.

Now, rehabilitated, it's indoors,
on the shelf where it belongs.
No clean paperback reprint available,
probably never will be.
And there are still faint traces
of wherever it lived before.
But these I can live with.

Gyppo

I went to a used book store in Los Angeles. There were fabulous full color, hard cover books on subjects like gardening in southern California, using water colors and so forth. I opened one when I got home and caught sight of a fast moving insect or something. I looked all over for it--started thinking it had been my imagination. BEDBUGS! By the time I was through I had to have my house tented, threw furniture away, the gas company had to turn off gas for the tenting and red-tagged my furnace in the process so I had to get a new one. My one dollar books cost me over five thousand dollars.

Little pipe smoke is no big thing. The lines in my hands are getting deeper, what does that mean?

Good story, Gyppo. Things I could see, feel and even hear. I've heard of dog-eared pages but not foxed pages so I looked it up... perfect word!

Your poem reminds me of how much I miss going to the library now that the Covid crisis has shut it down. Still do most of my reading on a Kindle but it can't compete with the feel of a printed page, the smell of a printed book, and the look of words on paper. Antique book stores, like libraries, have a kind of electric awareness that there in that quiet place are zillions of things waiting to be discovered, to feed our curiosity. Some of those authors have been dead for thousands of years. Some published their book when the Egyptians were building pyramids. Some when the Greeks were discovering science and art. Some in the Dark Ages when mankind turned away from science and art. Some during the Renaissance when men and women returned to the arts and science. Some put their thoughts and feelings into a book just a year or so ago. Doesn't matter where or when. Those writers are still alive in the words they wrote.