I wrote most of this last September while riding my bike through town. Yes, there is an empty college in my town. Here is a wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_College_of_New_England The property is being divided. This summer it was rented out as camp for Orthodox Jewish boys. At one point it probably could have been purchased, based on their debt and appraised values of some of the older houses, for right around $3 million. What kind of college would you start? Chester College was founded by a woman in 1965.

 

 

 

 

 

I often bike ride through the campus of the now defunct Chester College. I always pause at the Wadleigh Library. On dry September days, if it is not too windy, the smell of books permeates the building and reaches the outside. It’s a dry sweet smell that I associate with gardens. Maybe because books are made from earthly things.

If a library is like a garden, I know that I’ll unearth many other scents there. Open  the pages of an old, bound periodical, or a glossy textbook, its pictures remaining bright while Its obsolescence grew, and your eyes and nose might wince when the acrid paper dust hits them. You might sneeze at dust mites, disturb mildewy spiders that have stitched book to shelf with their nests or find signs of old infestations. The library I worked in was home to a vast horde of ladybugs many, many years ago; it Is still possible to find little piles of speckled carcasses here in there among the stacks, often behind volumes that are seldom read. I know that like a garden, part of the sensuous perfume is that of decay.

A well-used library is like a garden in full bloom. Full of noise and life, well used stacks in the children’s room, books flopped over, discourages the dust from settling there, much like feet trampling out a path through grass. Beloved volumes poke from the shelves, spines like unpainted posts on a really simple, but important, fence, as humble testament to their grand utility and value. Like a garden there is ceaseless weeding and cultivation, a cycle that repeats as long as there are people there who tend to it.

 

Library Perfume

Compositions sweetly decomposing,

Their yield to dust,

a feast for mites.

-Ellen Phillips