The Paper Trail
Harper's Bazaar India|June 2017

How the smell of old books recalls memories of youth and a lesson in ageing gracefully.

Jerry Pinto
The Paper Trail

“When I was home, manuscripts surrounded me. My friends told me, ‘you have gone crazy. You can’t talk about anything else.’ I said, ‘leave me alone.’ The manuscripts had a certain smell, and they said ‘you are smelling of manuscripts, Abdel Kadir.’”

—The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer (Simon & Schuster, 2016)

Every so often, some young person discovers that the attar-makers of X place in India—sometimes Jaipur, sometimes Mumbai, sometimes Falaananagar—have invented a perfume that smells like petrichor, the earth after rain. I wonder why no one has ever thought to make an attar that smells of old books. Could it be because they are generally ahl-e kitaab, people of the book? And the beautiful smell of a book is the smell of its ageing?

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 2017 من Harper's Bazaar India.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 2017 من Harper's Bazaar India.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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