An Aroma of Old Books
A friend of mine owns a used book store downtown (a Kingston fixture for the past twenty years). He had to go out of town Sunday and Monday so I minded the store for him.
There are tunnels of books in that place, dark mineshafts under the stairs whose walls are stacked with volumes like archaeological strata, layered with dust and cobwebs. In one of them I found a pocket-sized 2-volume Chaucer, a lovely little edition, printed in 1845. The notes were in Latin and the edges of the pages shone with gilt, bright as new.
I came away with a big coffee-table illustrated edition of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History, which will take me a while to digest. I've liked him ever since I read Some Problems of Greek History where he had a couple of speculative essays imagining alternate histories where Philip of Macedon or Alexander had succeeded in their aims. The Alexander history produced a Buddhist Greek steampunk empire as I recall :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee
Also got three novels by Alan Furst, whose darkly depressing but very human fiction about espionage and resistance in pre-World War 2 Europe is a favorite of mine.
http://www.amazon.com/Night-Soldiers-Novel-Alan-Furst/dp/0375760008/
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Star-Novel-Alan-Furst/dp/0375759999/
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Voyage-Novel-Alan-Furst/dp/0812967968/
Haven't read that last one yet, wheee! I also recommend The Polish Officer.
Finally: Architectural and Perspective Designs, by Guiseppe Galli Bibiena (1696-1756), the "principal theatrical engineer and architect" to His Majesty Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor. It's full of lovely prints of fabulous baroque architectural designs and stage settings. Inspiration for The Dreaming City game...
"Scene from the theatrical performance on the occasion of the nuptials of the Royal Prince of Poland, Prince Elector of Saxony"
The world needs more staircases of this sort.
The very back room is like a little cave, crushed under the weight of 100 years or so of limestone. It's been made into a tiny gallery. This is the current installation, something called "Heavy Gravity" if I recall. A fair number of people came in to look at it on Monday.