Bookshop Scent

I remember how in 1941 I spent a rather guilty night of security in Berkhamsted away from the fly-bombs and the fire-watching with my brother Hugh. Asleep in the Swan Inn I dreamt of the W.H. Smith bookshop down the High Street from which I had stolen The Railway Magazine all those years ago, and I smelt the individual smell of the shop which was like the smell of no other Smith’s that I have ever known. In my dream I found a book for which I had long been searching on a particular shelf, and so in the morning, before I had breakfast, I walked down the street to see whether my dream might prove true. I was disappointed, the book was not there, but what I noticed at once on entering the shop was that the familiar smell had gone, and without the smell the shop was not the same. I inquired after the manager whom I remembered well: he had died the year before, and I suppose the new manager had changed whatever was the source of the smell which had so long haunted my imagination.

Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (London: Slightly Foxed, 2010; 1971), p. 81.

Every Book By Its Scent

 I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years-never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize. Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare-it has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the leaves. The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand. For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition.

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; 1903), p. 29.