One day not long ago I had a few minutes to kill before meeting somebody for lunch, so I ducked into a book store. The Barnes & Noble was like most Barnes & Nobles….dark wood-like paneling and shelves, antique-style hanging lamps, lots of signs with fusty serif type in them. In other words, handsomely old-fashioned-looking.

Of course, nearly every fixture and decoration in the store was brand new, manufactured to look old -- a wall-to-wall illusion of tradition and quaintness designed to make my bookstore experience more…bookstore-ish.

Our culture's re-creation of the old has been increasingly obsessive-compulsive for 25 years now, and you see it everywhere today. And this is one of those things that September 11th has not changed, I don't think. Witness, for instance, the hit stage musical Mamma Mia, which is entirely based on the 25-year-old music of pop band Abba.

There are lots of reasons for this embrace of the old, or even the fake-old -- good reasons as well as some bad ones -- but a major reason, I think, is a yearning for authenticity. Which is a yearning that will, if anything, become more intense in these unnerving times.

We crave the brand new and the fresh, things in mint condition…but we want those same things to be tried and true and redolent of some golden age. We want instant patina.

Wandering the fiction section of the brand new old-fashioned Barnes & Noble store the other day, I realized that our yearning for the pseudo-old has gone an interesting step further. If the pseudo-old feels authentic, the pseudo-dogeared feels, paradoxically, even more authentic.

Right now there's a fashion for book jackets that not only look as if they were designed decades ago, but which appear as if they've actually been used for decades, and stained and nicked. Like the paperback edition of Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer-Prize, and is set in the 1940s. And Myla Goldberg's best-selling Bee Season - it's a novel about a spelling bee prodigy, and it's designed to look like a well-worn dictionary. And then there's Bruno Maddox's My Little Blue Dress -- a fake memoir of an old lady embedded within the fake memoir of a young man.

In other words, novels whose outsides as well as their insides are winking trompe loeil fictions. I know it's all ersatz. But I find that I'm a sucker for it anyway.

Which is yet another proof of the cultural genius of Samuel Goldwyn, who said many years ago, in all earnestness -- once you can fake sincerity, you're in.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.