I have a room in my house I haven’t cleaned for 20 years. An urgent selling of the property has forced me to start dismantling the dusty psychological museum and either dispose of its contents or rehome them. Some items were easier to get rid of than others; old election posters, telephone directories and multiple patches of Prestik.
There were original artworks made by friends and stacks of photographs with the original film roll in the envelope. And books. Many books, most not read. They are the hardest to get rid of. The rest of the detritus one ends up making ruthless decisions about. They go to the rubbish dump or onto the pavement. In my area, most items left on the pavement will be recycled overnight but the books never went to the pavement. Even in my desperation, it would seem wrong to do such a thing.
As I work in the TV industry, I found many mementoes in the room: Mina Moo’s hat, a lock of Patricia Lewis’ hair and a replica of Leon Shuster’s toe is in there somewhere. But the books I just shifted around in different configurations, not being able to reconcile myself with them decomposing in the same pile as the rat droppings and disintegrating curtains. Little did I know that it would be a rubbish dump that would save my books from the garbage heap.
Bez Valley
Bez Valley has a landfill site on 5th Street. At first, you drive past the place thinking, ‘This can’t be it.’ I was given a tip-off that there was a ‘community library’ there. When you drive through the alley of skips, filled with garden refuse and other recyclables, rows of books reveal themselves, stacked on shelves against a wall in an open structure at the back. On the left, there are shelves of old vinyl records in their covers.
I dropped off a bootload of books; some new, some old, some shiny ones and a few falling apart at the seams. They took them all. People can come to this place and take any book they want and leave a donation if they wish. The NGO running the project hope to get enough donations to add more shelves, some seating spaces, and organise it properly.
I found it quite a moving experience on a visceral level. I noticed a slight quickening of the heart and a sense of peace and hope crawled across me in the shape of a gooseflesh gown. Some people are moved to tears when they are there. The space offers the magic of a chance discovery. Books possess that enchantment on many levels.
Human experience
They sew together parts of the human experience in a way you can touch, see, and smell. Perhaps it is their smell that most attracts us to old books, without us even being conscious of it. Our olfactory sense is located close to the memory centres in our brains and has a more potent effect on our memorial circuits than our visual or audio feedback systems. Biblicor, that faint, comforting and nostalgic smell of old books, is so powerful that perfumers have tried to capture it in perfume bottles. Here, I was treated to it in a rubbish dump for free.
The aroma is caused by the release of volatile organic compounds as the pages of the book decay. Lignin, a chemical compound which is present in all wood-based papers, is close to vanillin. As it breaks down under room temperature it reminds people of coffee, chocolate or vanilla. The pages also retain some of the scents present when the book was first published, so we get an essence of the history of the book subconsciously, including where it was. We take an aromatic snapshot of a moment in history.
We might be able to see into the future, but we can smell into the past. Places we have never been to reveal themselves to us via our noses. It is striking and haunting.
Oliver Twist
One of the books I donated was Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. First printed in Great Britain in 1837, I had a version owned by my father, printed by Collins’ Clear Type Press of London and Glasgow, possibly in the 1950s. It includes seven ‘photographs in character,’ one of which was a depiction of Oliver himself as he put a bundle of books under his arms. The book lived in Germiston, South Africa for ±55 years, spent a few hours in the Bez Valley landfill site, and then made its way to Edenvale after it was picked up by a Facebook reader who saw my post.
Humans find this type of ‘cycle of life’ pattern in life beautiful. We are hardwired to seek out these tessellations and attach meaning to them, especially if the stories inside the pages tell us something about the human condition and our ephemeral place in it.
Additional significance
For me, the open-air library had an additional significance. Most of the books I discarded I had not read. They came from a room that represented a 3-D collection of ‘would haves, could haves, should haves.’ This library between the skips now represented a ‘can still be.’ Somebody else is now reading that book, even though I never did. Their father has now borrowed it and is reading it as you read this.
I still have a whole lot of old books in the room and I have to decide what to do with them.
I think I shall spend some time each day taking deep draughts and appreciating their pages while I work it out. When cleaning up a room or a life, one must be careful to not throw everything away.
I like the smell of old books dying. It smells like possibility.
[If you want to visit or donate, please contact LOCK (Love our City Klean) Keitumetsi Magawaza. 079 181 6769. They are on the corner of 19 5th Street, Bez Valley]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend
Image by Lubos Houska from Pixabay