Offbeat Angles_

There’s a certain nostalgia to the smell of old things. Like books, leather objects, cassette tapes, cameras… to me it invokes good vibes, feelings of warmth. I hadn’t been able to put a term to these nostalgic scents, but I think I might have hit it on the nose with this: secondhand bookstore smell. 

Thanks to my forays into film photography, I was exposed to people who lived and breathed vintage. They’d shop at thrift and vintage shops, perused vinyl, had a cassette collection, picked up used books here and there. Hence, I was exposed to smells my nose hadn’t experienced in ages.  

A combination of dust, musk, and age, its pierced itself into my memory. Memories of my parents popping a cassette of reggae music in while on a road trip to Colorado; memories of home videos made on an oversized camera; memories of paging through a worn book on a weekend with nothing to do, its age wafting to my nose as I turn the pages.  

But when I tried to put a name to this, I came across mostly negative associations. 

When I searched “thrift store smell” as an umbrella term, I came up with mostly videos of people trying to rid things of the odor. Then there was a thread on r/nostalgia asking about the smell. This had split responses, with some people looking on it fondly while others were disgusted by it. 

Surely this couldn’t be the thing I was looking for. But then again, what smells are good and bad are, at the end of the day, a matter of opinion. 

So, I posed my own question on r/nostalgia, seeking a name for what I was seeking. I got one response, but it was enough: the answer was decay. This was the eureka I had been looking for. 

It played into wabi sabi. The Japanese idea of impermanence and the beauty of aging things. At least, this is how I see it, as for several years I had been trying to incorporate wabi sabi into my way of living and thinking.  

For a more scientific explanation, and a bit more generic, I found a piece from Harvard Gazette on the connection between scent, emotion, and memory. In the article, it’s explained that we associate smells with emotions because both are “stored in the limbic system, which includes the amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory.” 

As for how this ties into secondhand bookstores? I’ve had some fond memories happen there as well. I’d often visit Bookmans Entertainment Exchange with friends while going to college in Flagstaff.  

I picked up a few DVDs of old films there – still have the Seahawk in my collection – as well as a very worn copy of the classic manga Akira. 

And all this now is coming back to me because of the smell of old things. My studies of wabi sabi taught me that, even as things age, they remain beautiful; their decay a reminder of the impermanence of all things. This I’ve kept with me until now, the smell of the old things I’ve come across and keep a reminder of the passage of time.  

Images via Unsplash