The smell of Greek books

is often the smell of smoke. Since very little of Greece is committed as of yet to the concept of a smoke-free workplace, most of the publishing houses and booksellers there are still havens for the chain-smoking bibliophile. How do I know this? Let's just say I have a very sensitive nose. I can always tell if our Greek suppliers were puffing away while they packed up our orders because the books are positively smokey when they come out of the box here in the sterile, climate-controlled environment of Widener Library, where it's been over twenty years since smoking has been allowed indoors (still, the thought that it was ever permissable to smoke in a library is mind-boggling - I hear they even used to have ashtrays in the stacks! How the entire collection wasn't lost about twenty times over by now is a genuine head-scratcher). Sometimes you can even hazard a guess at what the publisher/bookseller was smoking at the time. For instance, yesterday the books from one of Athens' most venerable presses all smelled of pipe tobacco, a departure from the customary cigarette odor greeting my nostrils when I open up one of their shipments. The publishers in Cyprus however are in a class by themselves - the books are so smoke-saturated that you swear they packed up a small Cypriot and a carton of cigarettes along with the order! Ah, I'll miss this cataloging job...