An Ode to Secondhand Books
Do you love imagining the past lives and owners of the secondhand books you rescue from thrift stores or discover tucked away in the used book store? Here’s a bibliophile’s reflection on vellichor and the magic of used books.
Guest post by Mary Denise
Vellichor – noun. The strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time.
The bell tinkles as I push in the door, and the scent hits me–that heady mix of paper, dust and age you find only in used book stores. The ones that lure you in, singing their siren song of lives lived and times gone by, flaunting their beautiful bindings and gilt-edged pages. These magical places possess something no shiny new bookshop ever could; a reach-out-and-touch-it link to the past.
I’m a fool for a book with a past in its pages. If it has a name written on it or, God forbid, a date, I’m lost. Many years ago my father, another bibliophile, bought a beautiful book of Tennyson’s poetry in pristine condition as part of a job lot for five dollars. Beautiful as the book is, it’s not the poems, the elegant binding or the illustrations that charm me. It’s the signature on the title page–
Hattie Sumner
Christmas 1892
Christmas 1892. A young woman in New York. Snow on the windowsill of a brownstone. Her taffeta gown rustles like wrapping paper as she opens her present, firelight glowing on her happy face as she cries out, ‘O thank you Mamma, it’s just what I wanted!’
Or maybe it was a gift from a special someone, a young man whose eyes held hers as he handed her his treasure, and it was of him she was thinking as she sat at her desk, dipping her pen in the inkwell and writing her name and the date in her flowing copperplate script.
How did Hattie’s beautiful book end up in a cardboard box in the Bronx? Was her life a happy one? Are her great-great grandchildren alive today with no idea that this ancestor of theirs ever existed?
Last week I went into a local antiques shop and came out with five books. (I knew the risk when I went in. I have no one to blame but myself.) No fancy first editions, each one priced below ten euro, each one with a signature. One was a cherished prize presented to a child in Victorian London for his Sunday School performance. Another was a day book belonging to an Irish girl in the 1930s, filled with the signatures of her friends, family and the nuns who taught her. I Googled the owner’s name and address and found her old home–now full of offices–and her old boarding school. Her book, her home, her school, all still exist. The teenage girl is long gone.
Why does all this matter to me? Why am I such a victim of vellichor? Is it because I know that some day I too will be forgotten, that one day my name will be no more than shadows on a page? If I am honest with myself, do I not hope that some day in another century a stranger will find my name in one of my precious volumes and carry it home, wondering who that woman was and what her life was like?
Until then I let the tinkle of the bookshop bell enchant me, and the tangle of time envelop me. I salute the vellichor of book stores!
About the author
Mary Denise is a secondary (high school) teacher of Irish and English, a bibliophile and tea enthusiast. Born in New York, she lives and works in beautiful County Kerry, Ireland.
What a lovely ode to used bookstores! I agree, I love seeing the owner’s name and date written inside, and perhaps a special note : )
Thank you Emma 😃 Yes, it really makes the book special, and a real voice from the past.
I enjoyed this ode! It may sound a little macabre, but I’ve looked on Find A Grave for the names I’ve found in books to read about what may have happened to them. In some ways, I feel like I’m honoring their memory by owning their book.
Oh. My. Gosh. This spoke directly to my soul. A beautifully written article. The love of used books and used bookstores is one of life’s great joys. All who vibed with this article, let’s please be best friends.