Byatt's fairy stories

An open-air mall lined with cheap boutiques and stationery shops, and headlined by a supermarket. Next to the greengrocer (trails of trodden lettuce leaves) is a second-hand bookshop. Outside, a tray of 'cheapies' (proclaimed, in yellow) - dog-eared paperbacks, the spines so bent you can't read the titles. Inside, shades of brown that conceal you from the sensual frenzy outside. Dun brown carpet, streaked and scratched wooden bookshelves, lacquered brown counter, yellow pine chairs.

You remember - when you were young and starting out in your career, you were a bit... naive. No, not naive - you just don't know any better (there's a difference). In varsity, where output was graded and critiqued and the marker had a marksheet, every A or B stroked your ego. You deconstructed the state of your industry, on at least three different premises, and you read the thoughts of future peers. Deep down you believe you represent a gestating revolution in the industry and you are eager to learn how to hatch the darn thing.

I can't speak for yours, but in the local media industries, management is often first seduced by and later annoyed by the eagerness of 'newbies' (a grand Thursday night story, told into glasses of wine). See, they think 'eager' means 'exploitable' (and 'expendable') and 'young' means 'cheap'. If you are lucky, management empathises with you but shrug their shoulders because that's just the way it is. If you're unlucky, you get management who have been through the same thing and would like to carve you a matching chip.

Six months in to working with one of the latter, I was off sick with sinusitis. (Note that I do not get sick, that is, without a psychosomatic stimulus. Do not scoff. Whenever and with whatever I am sick, I suffer from some degree of 'sight impairment'. Yip, turns out acute sinusitis can temporarily infect the optic nerves. Partial blindness in one eye.) I was off sick and I was horribly sad. So I wrapped myself up and drove myself (squinting) to the shops to get a movie and a magazine.

Instead, snivelling and with a wad of tissues in hand, I detoured to calm my soul among ceiling-high bookcases, yellowing paper and the promise of treasure. A good rule is to only buy books you have been looking for. Or to buy a bookshop. What would I find? Rushdie? Fowles? Calvino? Mitchell? Or the classics - James? Forster? Woolf? Some poetry?

A black spine, about 15 cm high. The title set horizontally in a thin white font. AS Byatt. The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five fairy stories. I pulled it from between its taller companions, forefinger behind the top furl of the cover - it was hardcover, with the dust jacket in perfect condition because it had been neatly covered in thick plastic. I knew then, but I'll tell you more.

The dust jacket is jewel green, with yellow text, the colours outdated now. The inside endpapers are the green of an evergreen shrub. The illustrations are taken from historical collections: a Persian musician, a jewelled peacock and a pious woman. The paper is thick but unvarnished, and textured in the type of grain you can see in brown paper. Each story begins with an historical black-and-white etching.

Mrs Byatt has been one of my favourite authors since I read Possession during my internship. (Damn straight I remember when - the book was thick and heavy, and the writing equally impenetrable.) I feel as though, under her primary author's voice, I can hear another, more tender one, always wondering. How does this work? Why? What happens when I pull this or that? Something sadly empathic under more academic toing and froing. Since then I had collected every secondhand book of hers I have 'unearthed', to build a collection of different editions.

This treasure is by far my favourite. It is my favourite because it represents the ideal of the secondhand hunt. It is my favourite because I was so sad and just holding this book in my hand... I can remember how overwhelmingly reassured I felt. Books like that are the reason I write and the reason I publish. When I think back, I can remember seeing it on the shelf, holding it and buying it, in a room made of blocks of browns. But perhaps that is just my sensory memory gratifying my emotional memory...

I have pulled out the book now and placed it next to me, to the left of my computer. Next to it is my next read: Ragnarok, also by Byatt. I found it by accident the other night, browsing the science-fiction section of the library. The book is thin - less than 200 pages - and a paperback. The yellow spine was pushed back into the shelf, so it was obscured by the tall and thick hardcovers around it. Is this how I am always to discover Byatt's allegories?

Luca Turin changed my life

You don't know who Luca Turin is? Some people think he's a hack and others a genius. I am on the side of genius. Whether or not his biology is worthy, the man has a nose and a sense of metaphor that changed my life. Let me explain.

One Friday evening bookshop expedition, I found a tiny hardcover in among the bold spines of other popular science titles. The cover is a smokey black and the title is written in a modern serif font, with large spaces between the letters lending it an edge of elegance: The Emperor of Scent.

The subtitle reads: "A story of perfume, obsession and the last mystery of the senses." Sprouting from this is a white dew-covered flower and two buds. The smokey grey is the dark background of the image, bleeding out.

The book is a memoir written by Chandler Burr, a journalist for the New York Times who wrote their perfume reviews - don't raise your eyebrows; you are still to discover the hidden world that is your sense of smell. It describes biophysicist Turin's increasing interest in our organ of smell and the perfume industry.

Like the war between Chomsky and Skinner, Turin pits the molecule vibration theory against the perfume industry's shape theory. The memoir is obviously weighted in support of Turin and casts him as the persecuted cowboy fighting the ills of urbanisation, and disregards contradictory evidence. This aside, Burr explains the theories clearly without patronising the reader, so even I felt like a competent biologist.

What enamoured me, though, were the descriptions of everyday scents, which break the smells into their components and build them back up again. Then there are the more unusual scents, which I doubt I have ever smelt, but can imagine. His metaphors are precise and you can't imagine any other plausible exposition of their merits and failures. The man is an olfactory genius.

The book obviously has implications for your reading of Perfume by Patrick Suskind, and vice versa. But it also has implications for your interactions with the world around you, using a sense that you probably never thought much of, sight and sound remaining the Zeuses of your sensory world, but in Turin's world our Hermes rules.

With the success of The Emperor of Scent, which somehow had gone out of print the last time I tried to get a copy, Turin has co-authored a guide to commercial perfumes, called simply Perfumes. The cover is beautiful, but what you don't see are the embossed, foiled and spot-varnished details.

Now I can get a fix of Turin every day, in his often scathing reviews of various perfumes (even those he ranks a five). Take for example, one of my favourites: Angel by Thierry Mugler. Calling the perfume "a high-energy state of contradiction" and "a joke", he breaks it down into:

a handsome, resinous woody patchouli straight out of the pipes-and-leather-slippers realm of men's fragrance, in a head-on collision with a bold blackcurrant and a screechy white floral.

This isn't the ambiguous realm of wine tastings, folks - find yourself a perfume stockist and try Angel. Then try another perfume and see if you can smell its components and how they work together. It's a miracle; I was blind but now I see. Whereas the epics among wine vintages suffer when set to a blind tasting, perfumes do not. You can distinguish a good perfume from a bad one almost instantly. Cheap perfumes are always bad, but so are most of the expensive ones.

If Angel is a joke, it is that of Truman Capote, while most perfumes are the slapstick comedies of Jim Carey or the gush of Maid in Manhattan.

This post came about from a recent foray into the perfume aisle. Oh dear heaven above, many of the perfumes have nice elements but ruin them by the dosing of one that drowns the rest. Not only against my skin, but against the objective whiteness of those paper strips. I felt like a walking headache.

With Turin's help, you understand how a perfume should engage with your own natural scent. How this engagement changes over the course of the day. How you shouldn't be able to smell a perfume that complements you, except for whiffs as you turn or gesture.

And the wonderful thing about this is, I think, something that is misunderstood about Turin. His is not the definitive off-with-her-head sentence on a perfume. Scent is about you. How it assists in creating your own identity, just as clothing does. (You can deny this, but then deny that you routinely categorise people based on superficial signals because you are able to process the immense amount of stimuli you are subjected to every day. I suspect that if this were true, you'd never leave your bedroom.)

I don't mind being a "perverse" joke, provided the meaning of it is my own.

I want the cover of my book to have this feeling

From the Book Cover Archive:

Robert Bolano's covers

You can't see the spine of 2666 here, but you can't possibly miss the book on a bookshelf. It's the same pink (I know there is a word for this particular shade but I can't think of it right now) as the title. And it is thick (think Joyce's Ulysses). When you open the cover, the eye belongs to a skeletal face that might be screaming or laughing. It's horrific. Which makes it strangely compelling. One review says that the novel contains the entirety of human experience between its pages. Which is even more horrific.

David Mitchell's covers