Vellichor

Monday, February 3

Another made-up word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Vellichor

n.

the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

---

Something I’ve wanted forever from the internet, and which theoretically should exist but I haven’t yet found, is a space that feels like being lost deep in the stacks at my university library. There was a randomness with which I encountered books — random soviet encyclopedias or 100-year-old dissertations — that I can’t recreate on the internet.

I can google things that I already know I want to find, but I can’t press a button to randomly encounter materials I didn’t know existed, that perhaps had been otherwise forgotten, which I might be the first person to read in a decade or more. And there’s no space on the internet for me to get lost in this pursuit. Wikipedia might be the closest thing to it, but even that is too modern and too active.

Until such a website exists, used bookstores and library stacks it is for me.