Smell Of The Week (2)
There is something intoxicating about the smell of old books, that heady mix of dust and mustiness with a dash of fragrance from the paper or parchment on which the text was reproduced. I had not really given it much thought but do certain books have such a distinctive smell that you could discern one from another? Is having a whiff of a book another way of enhancing your enjoyment of it? If blindfolded, could you identify a book simply by its odour?
Well, now, or at least when and if the Covid-19 restrictions are over, you will have the opportunity to find out, courtesy of the Institute of Digital Archaeology. They have captured the distinctive odours from books dating back as far as the 13th century that form part of the collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the New York Public Library, which will form part of their Sensational Books exhibition.
Each book has been put into a sealed chamber for 72 hours and bombarded with purified air, filters capturing particles that come from the pages. These then are turned into a paste, using high-powered centrifuges, from which the essence of the book’s smell is extracted. They also establish the chemical recipe of the smell so that it can be reproduced.
According to the curator, Roger Michel, you can establish from the smells the types of paper, ink and bindings used. You can even discover something of their previous owners or their history. Books from C S Lewis’s collection are heavily redolent of his cigars, whilst the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays have retained the scent of the pipe of their editor, Edmond Malone. Those books that survived the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 smell of, you guessed it, molasses.
Fascinating.
