some red house

he’d been looking forward to it for the last couple of weeks. a town of books. all this learning gathered in and offered up. trawling, browsing, leafing. but now that he was standing in the bowels of the cinema bookshop… that smell. what was it, precisely? glue? paper? the spores of some bibliophile lichen? catacombs of yellowing paper. every book unwanted, sold for pennies or carted from the houses of the dead. battersea books home. the authors earned nothing from the transaction...