Message to Posterity (on the use of paper cups)

Somewhere in the second decade of the 21^st century, KLM stopped using Styrofoamcups to serve their warm drinks. Those were replace by a new variety, a cooperation with the company called `Blond` from Amsterdam. Whatever its name could suggest, the company wasn´t stupid at all.

Those KLM `Cup of Blond` cups were made of paper and some natural additives. Therefore, when you drank your tea, there no longer was an artificial Styrofoam fragrance getting into your nostrils. No, when your nose got immersed in the savoury vapours, what you detected was this sweet, subtle smell of paper, the smell of good old fashioned BOOKS!

For those who think I made a typo here, and forgot to add an “e” in front – let me explain what I mean. Books are the ancestors of your e-variety. Instead of the words being displayed on a screen, they were printed on paper. Such books were always in flight-mode. You turned the pages, instead of scrolling. They included no interaction: no hyperlinks, no search buttons. If you needed to mark a fragment, you simply used a pencil, a bookmark or a post-it note. You might have seen some elderly people still browsing through them, shyly hidden in the corner. Do you get the picture?

Such books had a smell of their own. That fragrance was different depending on the kind of paper used, the age of the book, storage conditions, the perfume used by the reader, the conditions in which it was read (a book that had been dropped in an ocean smells different than an un-dropped one, even after drying) and many other factors. They made sounds – some of them cracked when opened, there was a gentle sound of rustling, there was the slight “bang” of closing the volume... (incase of large volumes, it became a … big bang). And, above all: they whispered when you turned the pages. They did. Whisper, this is what books did if you listened carefully.

When you just began reading, there was this lightness between the fingers of your left hand, and heaviness in the right one. As you approached the middle, the thickness on your left hand side increased. It was a very pleasant feeling. You knew you were past the middle if the fingers of your right palm had less and less to hold.

Towards the end, came the moment supreme – only a few pages left in your right hand. You felt the thrills down your spine – justa few more minutes, and you could close it, put it back, and run your index finger through the backs of the volumes in the bookcase (that’s a kind of a cupboard or wardrobe, but used for storing books instead of pottery or clothes). Only a few moments separating you from choosing your next destination, and that moment truly was thrilling… Winnie-the-Pooh got it right long ago: “… there is a moment before you begin to eat it which is better than when you are”.

Those books had one more advantage above the e-variety: their title and author were printed on the cover, so with just a little effort you could usually see what others were reading. That initiated many intriguing contacts with fellow human beings.

But I guess you can’t be missing something you’ve never smelled, can you? You certainly wouldn’t mind the fragrance of a plastic cup or an e-reader… You don't know any better, do you?