Monthly Archives: July 2012

Write (to Figure Out) What you Know

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I like to write. I like reading what other people have written. I like thinking about the ways in which stories (fiction or non) are crafted and put together. It’s fun and interesting to parse out how they were told, and how that plays into what kind of magical or prosaic dances of idea re-arrangement they can pull off inside our heads.

So yeah, I’m a word nerd. And now that the book about our bookstore is coming out this October, people sometimes chat with me about writing. Almost inevitably the words come up: “you wrote about what you knew, your bookstore.”

Well, yes and no. I wrote about the bookstore more to figure out what was going on than to express what I knew. Perhaps Joan Didion put it best: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

Writing organizes and orders our experiences, extrapolates meaning out of random events, reminds us that life is short but wide, as the Mexican proverb says. They day in front of us doesn’t always look like a part of anything bigger than itself, but it’s hooked to a whole life that builds to more than the sum of its daily parts. In writing, when you lay down what happens in a day next to what happened the day (or week, or month) before and the day (or week, etc.) after, it’s easier to see that what happened is more important than just what happened.

Perhaps writing is like marking the growth of a child against a door frame. Inch after slow, unfeelable inch, you can suddenly look back over three years and say, “Wow! Growth!” But you wouldn’t have seen that movement if it hadn’t been marked down.

That’s what “the bookstore book” (as we call it at our house) did for me. Five years of growing a shop, of learning to live in and among a community, measured against life’s door frame. No, it wasn’t so much “writing what I know” as to find out what I knew.

But I will tell you something about the act of writing our story down: although I’m over the moon that Little Bookstore is getting published, trying to remember and capture all the silly, strange incidents of day-to-day life on paper was almost as much fun as living through them the first time, in and of itself. Looking back at those little penciled lines against the doorway makes me smile.

Dust and Ideas

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Someone asked me recently, “What’s that lovely smell, the one you get in old bookshops, made of?”

Dust and ideas, as near as I can tell. And it’s not nearly so esoteric as one might think.

This past Friday some synchronicity appeared when two very different pals from the book world forwarded information on book smells. Lara in Canada sent the above photo about a new (quite nicely packaged) perfume called “Paper Passion.” And my agency, Harold Ober, tweeted this link:

@bookstorewendy: As the authority on Old Book Smells, what do you say to this analysis? mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives…

As the mentalfloss article states, old books carry “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” Yes, we all agree that the smell of books presents their history–and that it’s a pretty nice smell, to have inspired a perfume!

The vanilla-and-acid analysis is poetic, and as Charles Lamb said, “A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.” Plus, I have this somewhat silly idea that old books are heavier because they take in not only smells from their readers, but weight, from their readers’ minds.

As a college student I often helped a friend who worked in Psych Services check the meeting rooms before locking up at night. Sometimes when we opened the door of one of those little counseling cubicles, the heaviness of what had been discussed in there lingered on the very air. I don’t mean “vibes and aura” stuff, just that there was a palpable (usually dark) residue in those rooms.

Of course, not all thoughts are ponderous and ominous like thunderclouds; some are featherlight, airy as sunbeams. No matter which, it just makes sense that people reading books, pulling ideas out of them, leave a little of themselves behind–be that the breath of thought or the breadcrumbs of lunch.

All those leftovers contribute to the book’s smell, its appearance, its personality, if you will. This is something bibliophiles know and respect. In our bookstore, we often see people stop just inside the door and take a big sniff. And we know he or she is honoring the long history of humanity’s eternal library, inhaling that wafting odor of dust and ideas.