Posts Tagged ‘ news ’

When you walk into a bookstore (especially a used book store), what is one of the first things you notice? The smell of old books. Why is that?

Well chemists have found the answer to this question. According to AbeBooks.com and their video Why Do Old Books Smell?, “Chemists at University College, London have investigated the old book odor and concluded that old books release hundreds of volatile organic compounds into the air from the paper. The lead scientist described the smell as ‘A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.’”

Do we really need to know this information? Will ereaders someday emit a slit odor to stimulate our senses? Remember Smell-o-vision for TV’s?

Follow this link to watch Why Do Old books Smell? on Youtube.

Here is another video you may find useful from AbeBooks:

AbeBooks Explains how to Identify a First Edition Book

An blog post from The New York Review of Books by Tim Parks.

“Sir—” remarked Samuel Johnson with droll incredulity to someone too eager to know whether he had finished a certain book—“Sir, do you read books through?”  Well, do we? Right through to the end? And if we do, are we the suckers Johnson supposed one must be to make a habit of finishing books?

Schopenhauer, who thought and wrote a great deal about reading, is on Johnson’s side. Life is “too short for bad books” and “a few pages” should be quite enough, he claims, for “a provisional estimate of an author’s productions.” After which it is perfectly okay to bail out if you’re not convinced.

But I’m not really interested in how we deal with bad books. It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it. It’s only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when there is no enjoyment. “I’m a teenager,” remarks one sad contributor to a book review website. “I read this whole book [it would be unfair to say which] from first page to last hoping it would be as good as the reviews said. It wasn’t. I enjoy reading and finish nearly all the novels I start and it was my determination never to give up that made me finish this one, but I really wish I hadn’t.” One can only encourage a reader like this to learn not to attach self esteem to

Read the rest of the story on The New York Review of Books.