Rarissima and rariora are two nouns meaning "extremely rare books, manuscripts, or prints" and "rare books" respectively. Is there a word denoting common or everyday books, or books that have no special quality about them whatsoever? Here is the sentence it'll be used in:
"[T]hey would discover that the books they saw through the storefront window were not familiar and fathomable [noun I am looking for], but rather foreign and fathomless rarissima, wholly incompatible with the modern mind, and therefore of no interest to the modern reader."
I would like this word to be one word. The word doesn't have to be plural like rarissima and rariora, but it would be preferable. Thanks.
PS: This might be a tough one, as rarissima and rariora are recherché words themselves.
How I came upon these two delightful words.
I am a big logophile, so I make it my business to know my native language as thoroughly as possible. I was looking specifically for a word meaning "rare books," so, on a writer's hunch, I started with curio. (After all, rare books are “something considered...rare.”) That led me to Merriam-Webster’s thesaurus and the connotatively ribald word curiosa. I then decided to look up curiosa in the OED. Once I did, I wanted to see if there were any similar words referring to books in the OED's Historical Thesaurus (which is incredibly useful, by the way), and from there I found rarissima and rariora. (Many thanks, Oxford.) I was ecstatic to find two words meaning exactly what I wanted them to mean; English can oftentimes surprise you like that. But I believe to every word there is another with an opposite or partially opposite meaning, and that’s why I am looking to this site for answers. I realize that there’s not a word for everything, but for most things exists a word; and I hope someone can find the word I seek.