From: Mermaid . (britannica@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jul 26 2002 - 18:55:48 MDT
[Jake]Anybody else want to confess to similar or other abnormal perversions?
[Mermaid]I like to sniff the insides of books. I do it all the time. The
first thing I do when I get my hands on a book is to open it and read a
random page. A page, right off the middle of the book. Before I beging
reading, I sniff it. That makes us friends. I also read the last page if its
a work of fiction. I do not like surprises and I do not like tragedies. I
usually try to memorise the first and last lines of most fiction I read. I
am not always successful in retaining them. When I was in school, my
grandmother would send my text books away to be bound. The binders usually
return the books a week or ten days after school reopens. I sniff all my
books before they leave for binding. It's a fresh smell. When they return
back, its a 'wet' smell...or like soaked rice. Old books have a musty smell.
And then there is smell of *really* old books(those which at the
biscuit-paper stage...yea..thats what I call pages whose edges crumble in
your fingers as you turn the pages) that reminds me of dry roasted sesame
seeds. And then there are books so old that there are squashed bugs between
the pages. Sometimes even live ones. They smell like bug shit, I suppose.
And then, there was this time when our house was submerged for a few days
during a flood and when I returned home, my entire inherited collection of
books had turned brown and soiled with icky mud. They were destroyed and
couldnt be salvaged. One has to wonder about the power of water. Water had
sandwiched the books to each other and there was wet mud everywhere. I tried
to dry some of them and the pages were stuck together. They tore when I
tried to open them. It was all quite terrible. The smell of wet mud isnt
very pleasant. I tried to keep them and after some weeks, I was told in no
uncertain terms that they simply had to go. After that, I moved all my stuff
to the attic. It's not really an attic even. Just a crawlspace and a 40wt
bulb. Unfortunately, there were mice up there. Mice gnaw on books. They
suppose it tastes like food to them? They eat paper and they shit it out as
something thats totally vile. They multiply. My grandmother, who abhorred
house pets, allowed me to keep a cat which was more my book guardian than a
house pet. Somerset Maugham and Hemmingway, to this day, reminds me of rat
shit. Literally. Sometimes these smells arent real. When I see magazines
with bright colours and pretty pictures, I think of sandalwood and my
mother's large purse in which she would carry her favourite vernaculars. Her
purse and her books, like her, always had a light dusting of her favourite
sandalwood talcum powder. Prayer books remind me of jasmine and weddings.
Yup! Weddings have a fragrance too, but thats another story. Comic books
smell 'crisp'. Crispier if I am reading them for the first time. Poetry
smell like peppermint to me. Fiction smells like freshly ground coffee
seeds. When I look at maps, I think of the fragrance of the earth after a
fresh shower on a hot hot day. Sometimes I can smell a colour and sometimes
I assign flavour to feelings. I suppose these are somehow tied up to very
early memories. Sometimes, the fragrances that I smell inside my head
disappear. I dont understand them. I dont question them. I simply enjoy it.
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