David Giffels

Jerry Todd and the Purring Egg

When I was a kid, my parents used to make Sunday afternoon visits to the Bookseller in Akron and allow each of us to pick one old used book from the basement shelves, an endeavor that taught me one of the great joys of literature: its smell. In those basement stacks, I took to cracking open the spines and, when no one was looking, breathing deeply the dark perfume of aged pulp and ink, sometimes even touching my tongue lightly to the page for a taste. It was in this way that I selected "Jerry Todd and the Purring Egg," published in 1925, one of a series of B-level adventures for boys that quickly became a skewed passion. Because of the nature of the Bookseller's inventory, I became an aficionado of thickly anachronistic pulp literature, favoring books with fanciful frontispieces and characters named Red and Scoop and Cap'n and boys who drank coffee and other such truck. And always, always testing them first with my nose.

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When I was studying at Akron, I would do the same thing at the Goodwill store at the edge of campus (which store I will always associate with the smell of the Wonder Bread factory). That's where I learned that I was a fan of books with the Penguin penguin on the spine, without really understanding the higher principles of brand identity; when hundreds and hudreds of 25-cent books are randomly gathered and displayed with equal randomness, tiny details make all the difference. (Isn't that how butterflies find their mates?) I discovered Mary Gordon that way.

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