Φιλόβιβλος

Lege, perlege, volve, revolve, si vacat, si placet, otiumque sit; invenies (audebo dicere expertus enim loquor) tui similem φιλόβιβλον, φιλακαδήμικον, φιλόσπουδαιον, φιλόσοφον.

If you have a  free moment, if it pleases you, if there is time for leisure: read, read through to the end, mull over, and mull over again; you will discover [in this book] (I dare to say, for I speak as one with experience), a book-lover, an academics-lover, a study-lover, and a wisdom-lover like yourself.

From the letter of Thomas James, editor of Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon, dated 1599 and inscribed in the copy of that work formerly belonging to Lord Lumley and now held in the British Museum Library.

Philobiblon Society: Bibliographical and Historical Miscellanies, 1 (1854), pp. 1-5 (p. 4). My translation.

Two Neologisms

In recent years two neologisms have appeared to describe the smell of old books: Oliver Tearle came up with ‘bibliosmia’ in 2014, combining the Greek words for ‘book’ and ‘smell’, and a year earlier John Koenig, in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, invented ‘vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used book stores’, which, rather than connoting the smell itself, is the emotion that the smell invokes. The example he gives is: ‘There’s a bookshop on the corner and just walking past fills me with a sense of vellichor.’

Shaun Bythell, Remainders of the Day: More Diaries from The Bookshop, Wigtown (London: Profile Books, 2022), p. 61.

Librocubicularist

Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop (Edison: Castle Books, 2004; 1919), p. 170:

   “All right,” said the bookseller amiably. “Miss Chapman, you take the book up with you and read it in bed if you want to. Are you a librocubicularist?”
   Titania looked a little scandalized.  
   “It's all right, my dear,” said Helen. “He only means are you fond of reading in bed. I’ve been waiting to hear him work that word into the conversation. He made it up, and he's immensely proud of it.”