From Atlas Obscura:
It’s official. Science has decided that old books smell “smoky,” “earthy,” and more than anything, “woody.”
That’s based on findings released today by Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič, researchers at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, who have been working to capture, analyze, and catalog historic and culturally important scents. The scientists collected the responses of visitors to St Paul’s Cathedral’s Dean and Chapter library in London, asking them to describe the smell and later compiling the results in a document they’re calling the Historic Book Odour Wheel.
Part of the challenge, they said, was that everyone’s smell vocabulary is a bit different.
“Since the members of the public who took part in the odor evaluation of the unlabeled book smell were not trained, they tended to come up with terms that made sense to them, but were not easy to generalize (for example, ‘my mother’s room’),” they say. “Those terms do not appear in the wheel, and range from ‘hard work for people’ to ‘Victorian garments.’”
. . . .
“For the historic paper odor wheel we used established smell types and categories, and adjusted them to the character of the objects and space we were dealing with,” they say. “For example, ‘old room’, ‘musty’ and ‘dampness’ were grouped under the main category Earthy/Musty/Moldy. When no existing categories from the [wheel] encompassed the descriptions, a new category was created.”
Link to the rest at Atlas Obscura
I love the smell of mildew in the morning…
When the UChicago library moved from Harper to Regenstein in the early 70s, the smell of the books changed. Harper was an old traditional building with close packed stacks, no air conditioning, and almost no ventilation. The subbasement stacks had atmosphere enough to make you gag, maybe even faint. I worked one summer reshelving books down there and another summer moving books to the new Regenstein. Reg’s, as some of us called it, was a book preservation engine, temperature and humidity controlled and something to discourage mold. No smell, no gags or swoons, only bone chilling cold and humidity in the stacks.
Of course I love the smell of rotting books! Who doesn’t love every moment of being 19 and away from home for the first time?
Book sniffers!
I love paper books, but the newer ones don’t smell. At all.
My small collection of Victorians do stink. Usually of mold, sometimes of cigarettes. I stick them and various deodorizers in a plastic bag to get them to a point I can live with them.
I don’t want the stench. Just the words, thank you.
I read down far enough to see they associated earthy with mold. That made sense to me. Unfortunately I’m allergic.
I wish folks would harping on how books smell. Because seriously, this got silly years ago. Luddites tried (and still try, every now and then) to use the lack of “book smell” as a reason why e-books were inferior and would never catch on. That obviously didn’t work, but they’re still blathering on about the smell of a book. If they want to go around sniffing books, fine, but do they have to talk/write at the rest of us about it?
Maybe they need a nice support group or something….
Angie
Ah yes, smell that! These pages were once used to help keep the soil moist so the writer’s mushrooms would grow better.
Smells bringing back memories does work though.
Keesler AFB ’77, in ‘school’ learning how to troubleshoot and repair the airborne radios the Air Force was using at the time. ARC-51, modular UHF transceiver, dozens of tubes and a motor driven tuning system. A couple of the other students had already had their units ‘let the magic smoke out’ when I caught a whiff that seemed to be coming from mine. Each station had its own circuit breakers and I popped mine. The instructor came over to see what I’d managed to fry.
He had a good laugh, and I thought it was funny later but not at the time. You see, in ’77 you could still smoke in most buildings — and a guy a couple stations over had just lit up …
Electronics running hot and magic (and not so magic) smoke still brings back memories.
Oh yeah, that nasty smell from a blown capacitor, the smell of hot varnish and burnt humi-seal, the snap as you draw an arc and weld a test probe to the power supply… I miss troubleshooting electronics too.
And the similar smells associated with de-soldering failed parts and soldering in new ones. Yes, Those do really bring back a place and time to me.
I don’t remember any of our manuals or other paperwork smelling, except when we had to put White-out on forms…
Al who misspent his youth troubleshooting avionics
Ah, NO. The most evocative smelling bookstore I know is in Key West… the odor? Termites, very slowly eating through the stacks… I’m fine without the smells.
I started out in History before swerving into Archaeology, I did my dissertation from texts (no archaeological fieldwork at all for it), I love libraries and spent a great deal of time in libraries and book stores, but the smells of old books are the smells of them decaying, or of their surroundings.
Besides, smell to conjure up memories of what I got from a book? Maybe that works for the 12 books a year or less reader, but for a book a day guy, there aren’t smells enough in the world to catalog my memories.
I blame the writers (of Buffy) for perpetuating this tripe.
Al the Unscented Information Enthusiast
To be fair, this episode aired in the nineties, and the Giles character was supposed to be stuffy and something of a Luddite.
Giles from Buffy.
“Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences… long forgotten. Books smell. Musty and—and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer, is, uh, it… it has no, no texture, no, no context. It’s, it’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then, then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um… smelly.”
The problem with this is that it’s presented as a general truth. But the real truth is that there are people to whom smell is significant and people to whom it isn’t significant and people in between to whom only certain smells are significant or to whom smell becomes significant only in certain instances. People always tend to think that the way they experience things is the same for everyone else too when it just isn’t.
Me, I’ve got a terrible sense of smell and I rarely notice smells unless they are particularly strong or particularly unpleasant. Though it’s possible this is an adaptation I’ve made to living with 5 unhygienic children.