Theodore Dalyrmple has a wonderful appreciation of books and bookstores in the current New English Review:
Orwell says that the tops of books in such bookshops are the place ‘where every bluebottle prefers to die,’ and this preference, being biological in origin, has not changed in the meantime. The dust of old books, and ‘the sweet smell of decaying paper’, still have a peculiarly choking quality that catch one in the back of the throat. And second-hand bookshops are still one of the few indoor public places where a person may loiter for hours without being suspected of any serious ulterior motive.
And as a collector of books with interesting, non-authorial inscriptions, I was particularly touched by this:
I recently found another poignant inscription in a novel by Rex Warner, entitled Why Was I Killed? Warner was a classicist and novelist most famous for his dystopian fantasy, The Aerodrome. My copy of Why Was I Killed, printed in 1946, three years after the first edition, contains the following inscription, also in a cultivated hand:
Bought at Portmadoc and read while on holiday at Portmerion
10.x.1947
Below it is another inscription, in a completely unchanged hand, dated thirty years and nine days later:The last book read by Barbara during the illness which ended in her death. She liked the book enormously.
19.x.1977