Chel Owens

“It isn’t about reading the words [with books]; it’s about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.”

–The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow

29 thoughts on “”

  3. so true, Chel: there is nothing like the smell of a book — reading on a laptop isn’t quite the same; books –the physical objects — will never go out of fashion —

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  4. Sweet words won’t resonate if you ain’t open to them though. So read that book, don’t just sit and look at it.
    Just in passing, I like to buy ex-library books online- the records, stamps, location of the library, the town, city where the book had been shelved and loaned- I ‘check it out ‘ so to speak on Wiki, and that gives an outlook on places I have never been to. A kind of random tour of faraway places, be they beautiful or banal.

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  6. I love the satisfaction of turning the pages of a new book and creasing pages that have never been creased before.

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  9. I’m a minimalist compared to my wife. She’s not a hoarder, but she keeps everything. I have a policy of “if it hasn’t been worn or used in the last year it goes to the donation bin”. That applies to everything except books, vinyl records, cassette tapes, cds… you get the picture. Books and vinyl hold special memories and sensations – tactile, sensory, and emotional. Love the quote!

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