The Scent of Books
by Kevin Schofield • Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, England

Books can be very seductive. I’ve picked up books that feel really good and smell good. In fact, the scent of the pages can sometimes be quite intoxicating. And some old books seem to have the power to invoke a special magic; a sort of sensory essence distilled from the people and lives that have touched them down the years.

For example, I know that other eyes than mine have read my 1848 copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. Inside the front cover the first owner has recorded the momentous times in her life in beautiful copperplate handwriting. She has recorded her marriage in 1849 and the deaths of her five infant children. Each child is commended to God with her prayers and blessings. There are flowers pressed between the leaves, and annotations (in a different hand) in the margins. The book is like an emotional time capsule, and I love to open the pages and breathe in the scent of so many past times and dreams.

In Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, a mechanical hound dog is used to track down book-lovers by their scent. In this dystopic tale, books are banned, and “Firemen” are employed to locate and burn them. They burn them to maintain the citizenry in a state of empty-headed conformity to the status quo. Bradbury’s novel mirrors reality in many countries in the modern world, and during many eras throughout history, books considered seditious by the authorities were consigned to the bonfire, and sometimes their owners with them. To tyrants and dictators, books have an unsettling smell of dissent. They sniff them cautiously, unsure of the potent words within.

The potency of words can also have a profound personal impact. There the words lie, inert and unread between the covers of shelf-bound volumes, until some incautious person plucks a book from the shelf and begins to read. He reads and becomes entranced, and in some strange way the book begins to sense the reader’s scent – it smells his flesh and spirit, and his fears.

One such book powerfully changed my life when I was twelve. The book was George Orwell’s famous political satire 1984. It was the first time I’d read a truly adult novel, my taste in literature prior to that age being limited to Biggles, and similar derring- do stories. 1984 shocked me deeply.

In the book, Orwell relates the rebellion of Winston Smith and Julia against life in a nightmarish totalitarian society where love, privacy and independent thought are crimes. Winston and Julia fall in love, but they botch their plans to enjoy a secret life together and are caught by the police. As I read about their arrest and imprisonment in the “Ministry of Love”, I became enthralled by Orwell’s brilliant prose, and felt sure that Winston and Julia would endure the relentless tortures of the “Thought Police” and escape. But their nightmare world was total, and there was no awakening from its hideous terrors.

In “Room 101” Winston encounters his most dreaded fear - Rats! A cage is strapped to his face with two starving rats inside; only a movable partition protects his eyes and flesh from their ravenous hunger. Blind fear usurps his humanity, and he screams in abject terror “Do it to Julia!” He is spared the rats, but his being is utterly debased and dehumanized. The Thought Police are satisfied. All Winston’s traitorous thoughts are brainwashed away, and he is reduced to a simple mechanism of conditioned reflexes, with no human emotion left except an infantile love for “Big Brother”.

I realized when I read the words “Do it to Julia” that I would probably have done as Winston did, and condemned a loved-one to unspeakable agony in order to escape torture. The moral dimension of my self-concept, built on my parents’ moral teaching and the ethical injunctions of priests and teachers, withered inside me, and I knew myself as sham and insincere. Nowadays, I have a clearer appreciation of Orwell’s condemnation of state terrorism, and I’m not so self-punishing and absolutist in my self-judgments. But the words “Do it to Julia” still haunt my mind.

Perhaps the next time you go into a junk shop or second hand bookshop you might be attracted to a particular volume. Please pick it up. It has a tale to tell, not only in the words it contains but in the people who have read it in the past. Smell it, touch it, breathe in the dreams and ghosts it contains. But beware! It just might pick up your scent!