The Smell of Old Books vs Plain Vanity: What Makes Us Buy Books?

Why do we buy books? Is it for nostalgia’s sake or the smugness of being able to say you’ve read more than another?

Why is buying books often such a vain activity? (Photo: iStockphoto)

I have this whole backlog of famous writers I want to read.

But each time I visit a book store, my mind draws a blank. I literally cannot remember the name of a single author on my list when I’m asked if I’m looking for anything specific. The only person who comes to mind in that oddly high-pressure environment, for some bizarre reason, is Kurt Vonnegut. Fucking Kurt Vonnegut. He’s not even in the top 20 (maybe he should be…).

I literally cannot remember the name of a single author on my list when I’m asked if I’m looking for anything specific. (Photo: iStock)

So I stumble around like an imbecile, pretending to appear like a Super Serious Discerning Reader, secretly just hoping to spot a familiar name. I once picked up a Milan Kundera book only because I confused him with JM Coetzee. The only reason I read Coetzee in the first place is because I confused him with someone else. And on and on.

So each trip to a shop ends with me coming back with a deck of books that’ll spend years rotting away on my over-crowded bookshelf before I get to them – if at all – and I know this even while I’m entering my debit card PIN through gritted teeth and salty tears.

How Books Become Like Furniture We Cannot Do Without

Each trip to a shop ends with me coming back with a deck of books that’ll spend years rotting away on my over-crowded bookshelf before I get to them. (Photo: iStock)

Why do I do this? It’s like how I come back with 20 different types of chocolates, wafers, and biscuits – naturally forgetting the soap and toothpaste I went there to buy – each time I visit a grocery store.

But bookshops are not departmental stores. I can’t eat books. I buy books because we’ve all been taught, from an early age, that books are pretty. They’re furniture. They add that acquired sense of character, of culture, to a room that no pine-oak-rosewood antique French armoire can match up to.

It’s vanity.

And we’ve been taught that they hold sentimental value as works of art, similar to how old vinyls/cassettes/tapes/laptop folders/thumb drives of cherished albums make you feel.

We’ve been taught that books hold sentimental value as works of art, similar to how old vinyls/cassettes/tapes make you feel. (Photo: iStock)

The Unavoidable Pull of the ‘Smell of Old Books’

Of course they make you smart – and it’s easy to confuse the two – but that’s why you read books, not why you buy the physical prints, especially not in the age of the Kindle.

The reasons behind the exchange of cash for dead trees are aesthetic and emotional.

You buy the book in the vain hope that it’ll one day hold the same place in your heart that your tattered copy of The Magic Faraway Tree does. I don’t fully buy into the concept, but I’m a slave to the system. (It still makes me angry that my copy of Franny and Zooey was once lost in transit while shifting houses – the attachment is legitimate, if also daft.)

The Smell of Old Books is the lit-cliché equivalent of the wind in your hair, the smell of wet grass. (Photo: iStock)

The clincher, though – beyond the assumed intellectualism and visual delight books provide – is that damn smell – ah, the Smell of Old Books. It’s the lit-cliché equivalent of the wind in your hair, the smell of wet grass. The Friends catchphrase still uttered in conversation like it’s the joke of the century.

But it exists for a reason. I won’t even deny that the smell of old books is lovely, particularly when the edges are all frayed and the yellow must settle in on the once-loved pages. It’s an instant gateway into the timeless world of nostalgia, in a way only music can match.

But I’m sure books smell for the same reason old clothes smell: discharge of chemicals, regular human contact, environmental factors, and moral and physical degradation. It’s just that the decay seems to somehow trigger a pleasant smell, unlike clothes (yuck).

The decay of books somehow seems to trigger a pleasant smell. (Photo: iStock)

Books Can Make You Feel Inadequate or Smug

From a point of pure logic, the fetishising of old books makes very little sense. Even though I do exactly the same – purchasing shit loads of books, then treasuring them for decades after – I don’t quite see the point. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, of course – all they do is cost money, take up space, lead to the culling of thousands of trees, and shiftily change colour. Plus, they make already conceited authors feel even more pleased with themselves (whoever heard of a writer both happy and good?).

And they make you, the ‘reader’ (purchaser of said product), feel inadequate, reminding you of all the books you still have to read; or smug and self-satisfied at all the books you have read.

Neither is a good fit.

Books are little time capsules that hold memories of times past. (Photo: iStock)

If you look past the nihilism of what I’m getting at, it’s really easy to understand how books have such a strong effect on their owners. They’re little time capsules that hold memories of times past – of endless struggles and small victories, of personal growth, of a life passing you by; a longing for an age of relative innocence. I concede that the charm, the pull, is undeniable. What I’m really trying to grasp – without casual dismissal of the concept – is the Why.

There’s a fine line between being a collector and a nutty hoarder. And it’s honestly fascinating (and confusing) how books blur that line.

(Akhil Sood is a New Delhi-based freelance music and culture writer with an undiagnosed fear of tomato sauce.)

(This article was first published on 24 March 2016. It is being reposted from The Quint’s archives to mark World Book Day.)