I Smell Some Omissions

Here you go, folks, a brief description of why people always say to me, "You smell funny." Provided by a proper English fellow--it's got to be true, right? Well, not so fast there, John Bull. The videoed Limey might work among scores of volumes that have been sitting on gilded shelves in some country manor house for centuries, hence the "hint of vanilla" he detects emanating from his previously read tomes, but I work in a good old fashioned (sic) strip mall used bookstore, American variety. We see, and unfortunately at times, sniff, books that have been through a little more world-weary experience than tea times and cricket folderols, books bearing a few odors a bit more pungent than vanilla and tobacco. Mold, syrup, flame, sticky-fingered three-year-olds, felines (the hair is bad enough; the urine you don't want to know about), asbestos, mice, road salt, goldfish crackers--try assessing the value of a Danielle Steele volume with any three of the above (or dozens more that aren't immediately springing to mind) having left their marks, and stinks, on it.

"Show me a man's bookshelves and I'll tell you his soul," someone famous once boasted. Well, daily I see a man's tattered box of books that he's decided no longer warrant shelf space, let alone ownership. My innate philanthropy won't allow me to describe what the box says about his soul, but I sure can tell you the olfactory state of his flesh and blood and domicile, and let me tell you, it ain't no garden of roses.