Ummmm, guilty. Blast it though, it's not my fault! It's from growing up near small town libraries and filling entire summer days with those places. The cool shadows, the quiet creak as the building settles thoughout the day, the (seemingly) endless things packed and stacked and waiting for me. Yes, and the smell that tells you where you are as soon as you walk in (something a modern library doesn't have generally due to proper climate control).

That smell that my adult mind tells me is the books going bad and rotting away as we speak is the same smell my emotional mind says "Books. Good. Read." Isn't smell the sense most linked to long term memories? Maybe that's why some of us still love the smell of old books.

Hmmmm, there would be an interesting product: Scent of Old Town Library. (Yes, you to can have that same feeling in your home paperback collection as you get in the great libraries of the world!)