Last Saturday, while visiting my younger son at his upstate New York camp, I took refuge from a sudden thunderstorm in a rambling old Lake Placid bookstore. There are few greater pleasures in life than finding oneself trapped in a bookstore on a rainy afternoon, but the pleasure, for me at least, is always mixed with melancholy. There they stand, dim shelves of forgotten authors, their bindings and endpapers giving off a sullen fragrance of resentment, like distant relatives at an obscure funeral, all the stranger for their odd familiarity.

The shop was packed with the works of authors I seem to encounter only on such serendipitous occasions: I don’t know them, or their books, but a heaviness settles over me when I meet them again. There were a few, such as James Gould Cozzens or Pearl Buck or Thomas Costain, whose one-time acclaim even I could recall. Others had been popular in my grandparents’ generation and were little more than faded names. I’m as wary of these forgotten writers as of premonitions in buckram. After all, how many names that are loudly toasted today will be joining them, in the not-so-distant future, on their moldering shelves?

The name of the shop was With Pipe and Book. The acrid mildew of the massed volumes was softened by the fragrance of cigars and pipe tobacco, a specialty of the genial proprietor. I liked to imagine that those disgruntled reputations were somehow mollified – or at least mildly sedated – by the fragrance in which they dwelled. As I wandered down the aisles, my eye fell on the peculiar name “Ponkapog.”

Like every other frequenter of out-of-the-way bookshops, I patrol the shelves in the hope of coming upon some neglected gem. Should we discard a book just because some passing fashion left it stranded on a desert island of dead taste? The book I slid from its crevice was by Thomas Bailey Aldrich and titled “Ponkapog Papers.” I liked the title, which reminded me of something Wallace Stevens might have entertained. Published in Boston in 1903 (perhaps Stevens even read it), the volume comprised a miscellany of little essays, aphorisms, random thoughts, and genial lucubrations of a sort to which I am all too partial.

I let the book fall open and an enchanting scent of mildew filled my nostrils. I was a librarian for many years and affirm that there is no sexier smell on earth than the mildew of old pages – at once pungent, teasing, and astringent, with a saucy bouquet that lingers on your fingertips. My eye fell upon a discussion of the habits of porcupines; in particular, the momentous question of whether they roll themselves into balls when provoked.

Aldrich invokes John Burroughs on the subject. He is himself undecided; his dog Buster disagrees with Burroughs, it seems, and of course I’m hooked. Here I should disclose that as a child I had a pet porcupine and never observed him curl himself into anything – in fact, if memory serves, he was pretty much a ball all the time, a ball with alarmingly yellow incisors – and so the discussion was of more than academic interest to me.

Absorbed as I was I nevertheless began to feel a certain unease. How frivolous our forebears were! The Civil War was still fresh and Thomas Bailey Aldrich could divagate at preposterous length on the customs of Adirondack rodents! Had I, or any of my contemporaries, grim as we are, ever known such insouciance? I began to feel a certain smoldering annoyance at Thomas Bailey Aldrich with his foppish concerns. No wonder you’re neglected, and a good thing, too, I found myself muttering.

I won’t dwell on Aldrich’s prestigious career. Novelist, short story writer, composer of light verses, editor of the Atlantic Monthly for some nine years, he lived, and enjoyed great success, from 1836 to 1907. (To update W.H. Auden, “a Google search will tell you all the facts.”) Someday, I hope, the Library of America will reprint a selection of his fiction and essays; he deserves that. But what fascinated me afterward, when the rain had stopped and I meandered down the flooded streets of Lake Placid, was a queer disjunction of sensibility.

I share, we all share, innumerable things with Thomas Bailey Aldrich; he is unmistakably American to the roots of his hair and the twang of his Yankee speech. But he is as remote from us as a Sumerian priest. We recognize his accents, we feel a twinge of kinship when we read him; at the same time, he is, and will forever be, unutterably foreign to us. All that has occurred between his death in 1907 and today stands as a gulf between his sensibility and ours. Yet we know him, we respond to his silliness, his arch turns of phrase, his pleasure at his own cleverness.

Later, turning to his travel essays “From Ponkapog to Pesth” (1883, out of print but available everywhere on the Internet), I found myself torn between admiration of his robust bonhomie as a writer and distaste at his smugness. But am I myself really so different from Aldrich when I travel abroad? He has much to say about beggars and balconies, popes and palaces, and I agree with most of it: plus ca change … I think myself cosmopolitan, but wince with agreement when he pokes fun at European sanitary accommodations or Neapolitan cadgers or English tightfistedness. Yet an awful sadness separates us. Will the world he traveled ever be so innocent again? Will anyone ever be bold or obtuse enough to write with such lightheartedness again?

I owe something to the shades of those forgotten authors in their redolent aisles. Thomas Bailey Aldrich was not a great, or even a major, writer. His travel narratives are witty, astute, congenial; if they lack the serpentine sensibility of his near contemporary Henry James’s accounts – well, whose don’t? But they are beautifully written, often quite funny, and well worth reading. They bring us startlingly face to face with who we once were and what the world once looked like to American ingenuousness. I read him to escape a downpour, and he led me back, amid a suffusion of tobacco fragrances, to some earlier America that still persists in the very throb of loss.