Quip Show

I picked up Travels WIth Charley at one of the used books stores on South Broadway a few weeks ago. It was really great and I’m more motivated than ever to take a cross country road trip with a poodle. But this particular edition led to an observation that I spent some minutes investigating. I confirmed my hypothesis to my own satisfaction, but in the interest of scientific veracity, I should open my findings up for peer review. 

While Steinbeck was vividly and beautifully detailing this great nation, and solemnly contemplating its bleak future, I was thinking, “This book really has a distinct smell.” I recognized the smell, having smelt it before, and I always thought that is was just the scent of decades-old paperback and estate sale. But I have a lot of old paperbacks and some have this smell, some don’t. 

So I did what anyone would do faced with such a mystery and started smelling my paperbacks. I took great inhalations, like I was scrutinizing the bouquet of a fine french wine, and then put them in one of two piles: “Smells Like Travels With Charley” and “Doesn’t.” Was I deterred by my wife’s cynical laughter? Any true scientist knows that naysayers will always put obstructions on the path to enlightenment. The only way to answer them is to persevere. 

 After all the paperbacks had been accounted for and put in their appropriate pile, I examined the books for any similarities other than smell. I went over their authors, their genres and no pattern emerged. The editions seemed to be published between 1950 and 1970, but books in the “Doesn’t” pile had several editions published in this timespan, so I knew that couldn’t be the answer. Then, as I was checking the spine of I Sing The Body Electric, in profile I saw a tiny red rooster. This book was published by Bantam Books. (As a side note, when I was little I thought it was Batman Books.) All the editions in the “Smells Like Travels With Charley” pile had been published by Bantam.

Which begged the question, had Bantam books, in a moment of pure marketing genius, invented old-book smell and applied it to the paperbacks they published in the twenty-year span between 1950 and 1970? Based on my findings: yes, absolutely.