The Smell of Old Books

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

― Arthur Conan Doyle,  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)

I love the smell of old paper: sweet, dry and nostalgic.¹

Some people, of course, dismiss it as the smell of must, mould or decomposing wood.

But to me, it is also walking through a copse of trees in summer, climbing into a wooden treehouse, browsing the shelves of an old library, sitting down on old furniture, searching through the storeroom in your old house, a secondhand bookshops’ cosy atmosphere, and smelling chocolate or coffee beans.²

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