Yesterdays Books

for a while now i’ve been taking advantage of the online used book market which is piling up the stock from all of those vulnerable little bookstore--- the smart ones, seeing the writing on the wall & no doubt, the commercials for kindles, nooks and the pandigital novel for androids, they have committed their store’s holdings to bigger online reservoirs who are getting rid of tons of literature for next to nothing, as the death of print media & the complete conversion to ebooks looms on the horizon. today i received one in the postal mail, the snail mail, which still holds true at present in serving a legitimate function which we have yet to make digital--- while opening the package to pull from it the work i had ordered, i was submersed in a wave of old book smell--- it was not the moldy disgusting smell that you might find at a garage sale when people are throwing away their junk because the ceiling had fell through and water had gone everywhere, instead, it was the smell that only a reader who has been taking part in the act for quite some time would know--- it is as if the wooden shelf that the book had been sitting on for all these years enveloped the book itself & holding the book to my nose, flipping the pages slowly i felt like i was in a library all to myself & as i have in the past, like a kid in a candy store, i felt as if this online rounding up of all the dying little stores was my own way of turning my abode into that store which liberated me through offering me so very many abundant treats--- this smell tickled my intellect & my consciousness, it wreaked something of sandlewood, dust and quite frankly aged paper, which holds a unique & wonderful scent all its own. yesterday’s books never seem to disappoint & that is not to say that i do not look forward to more years being alive where large quantities of new literature do not make their way to me via our most cutting edge technology whatever that might be--- i consider it a pleasure to stroll amidst the paragraphs, the sentences, the words, the meanings & the overall narratives, wherever they might take me.