Bibliomania, part III

The white lights of the bookstore, glaring and aseptic, blinded the Old Man for a moment as he came in, hair dishevelled by the wind, eyebrows contracted in a frown of distaste at the light, the music, the people. The Old Man had a complex love hate relationship with the bookstore he went to every other week to replenish his stock of books. He despised going out of his house, having to dress warmly with a scarf and coat as today; he hated the young people who worked there and asked if he needed help to find a book; or the neat, sparse, linear layout of the store. However, what the Old Man hated most about the bookstore was the smell, dry and lifeless, more akin to a strange mix of fine candles and coffee than books. He could not conceive how a store of this size, containing so many books, did not even smell like ink and paper. Nevertheless, the Old Man was obliged to go if he wanted to constantly have material to read and analyse. The bulk of the Old Man’s book collection consisted of a large library he had inherited from his father, books passed down through many generations; but in order to obtain newer publications and things the original library lacked, he needed to come here, to this lifestyle temple of commercial literature, and buy. The Old Man would enter the bookstore, bracing himself for the ordeal, preparing to encounter people, and grunting and nodding he set out at a decided pace among the aisles in order to find suitable reading material. Most of the time the Old Man had nothing in mind, he just walked through the store, reading titles and grabbing books by chance as he went. After some time he would bring the great stack of volumes in his arms to a bench in the corner of the store and there leaf through his selection, keeping those he found interesting and leaving those that did not prove decent enough. After this strike the Old Man would then go around the store a second time, this time searching for titles he needed; books and authors he had come across in his other readings. When he was done, the Old Man would haul his books to the cash desk to pay. This was the part he hated the most of his outings, when he had to willingly come in contact with someone, take out some of the money sent to him by the bank every month, count the bills, ignore the harassing questions of the employee. The Old Man detested his outings to the bookstore because it forced him to put himself in danger, to leave the comfort of his home, his domain, but he needed to add new books to his collection, and therefore his visit to the bookstore were necessary.

The Old Man loved books not only for the knowledge and literary power they encompassed; he loved books for what they were physically. He loved books as objects, too. He found them beautiful; different in size, and shape, and colour, they were sometimes elegant and refined, bound in sober leather, sometimes flamboyant and loud. He liked to see them stacked in neat piles, or strewn with carelessness on the floor, on a chair, on a cushion. He liked to see some open, to observe how dog-eared paperbacks fell limp when they dropped down, like a dead thing. The Old Man liked to touch books, also; from fondling the smallest hardcover, just the right size in his hand, to turning the pages of large art books, enormous like the lid of mighty chest. He enjoyed comparing the grain of the different papers: coarse for the yellowed mass markets, silky for the larger paperbacks, thick and clean for hardcovers, brittle and thin for old books, or the Bible. He also loved to gently pass his finger over the covers, feeling the paper, cardboard, plastic, fabric, or leather from which they were made. And the smell, of course, which he could not help himself from testing for every book he read. If the Old Man liked the smell of books together, as a symbiosis of thousands of books packed tightly in the same room, he also enjoyed smelling each book individually and analysing their unique scents. He found some books smelt strong, like vinegar, and these were often recent and cheap publications, others he found more developed, more complete. Like a connoisseur comparing the aromas of different wines and enjoying the complete body of an aged red, he would note what he smelt in his mind, relishing the delicate balance of the odour. Books were better than wine, though, because they were never spent; you could open a book one day, put it to rest, and open in it in a month, in a year, in a lifetime, and understand the evolution of its smell better than that of any wine. The strong odours, deep and grave, outlined by the musky scent of aged paper and ink, he enjoyed the most, but he still liked the crisp, hot glue smell of a new paperback. The Old Man loved his books with passion and determination, with all of his senses and with all of his being, because his books were the essence of his life, and without them he had no purpose, no existence; without them he would just fade away. So his expedition into the world to collect more books were a necessary evil, a perilous hardship which made him even more grateful for his life of quiet literary contemplation. Every minute of his time outside his apartment, he yearned to have his sofa under him and a book open before his eyes, instead of the tumultuous ugliness of the real world.