What’s nice about bookstores is that you get to stand in a room where people’s imaginations are filed. So it’s kind of like standing in a room with infinity.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but infinity has a distinct odor: “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness,” in the words of a scientific report on the aroma of old books. The report declares that books release volatile organic compounds into the air, according to ScienceDaily. Whatever they are, they remind me of Narnia, and the time I cried because the buzzards were circling the red pony. In fact, people are so attached to book odor that there’s a market for an air freshener called Smell of Books.

No two bookstores smell alike, of course, but some of them are definitely cooler than others — like, for example, the 800-year-old church/bookstore in the Netherlands. Evidently the Dominican church in Maastricht didn’t have a congregation, and after serving for a short time as a storage site for bicycles (oddly), it was converted into a bookshop called the Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen, according to The Guardian. What better place for the storage of people’s imaginations than a spiritual structure? The architects did a lovely job of constructing bookshelves that contrast but complement the design of the church (see pics here). And the high windows and stone walls command just the kind of hushed reverence literature warrants.

Another intriguing bookshop convert is a Buenos Aires theater built in the early 1900s, which became a bookstore in the year 2000. In this El Ateneo bookstore, the café is on the stage, and there a plenty of places to cozy up with a book on the theater’s multilevel balconies.

But the best bookstore I’ve ever visited was Shakespeare and Company in Paris, mostly because I was reading Hemingway’s memoir “A Moveable Feast” at the time, in which he mentions he frequented the shop. We had no plans to visit the place, but I spotted it one night while we were walking back to the Metro and ran inside to smell its smell. The books were crammed from floor to ceiling, and the door frames and shelves were smooth, worn wood — the kind you want to run your hand along. Just for good luck.

Shakespeare and Company's carefully disheveled poetry books.

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