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It's spring, and Old Man Winter has taken himself and his blowhard cold opinions and dusty jacket and left. So long, buddy. Keep it real, pal. With spring comes blossoms and that gentle shake that, hey, everything's gonna be okay. You're still alive. And also, hey, what's that smell? While Old Man Winter didn't quite leave in a total huff before the spring cleaning, there is that surveying of the interior landscape. Toothbrush bags, pieces of pizza, crumbs, and that used book you promised you would finish in December. But there it lays in the corner of the couch, gnarled, looking in at itself. Before you even pick it up, you smell it. What is that? The middle school library? The college dorm room? My grandfather's car? Claire Armistead over at The Guardian recently looked into the science of old books. The smell, the type, the age. She, along with everyone else who has been around a book, found that every book has a distinctive smell, and each smell says something about how and when it was made and where it has been. Some of the various smells, off the top of the head, cocoa, wood, salt and pepper in an old cabinet that has a touch of the sea and yet dryness, and it keeps going, biscuits, the smell of rain, chocolate, coffee, old, rust, burnt, smoke, bread, vanilla, fall leaves. We could keep going down this rolodex of Proustian olfactory descriptors, but that lack of vocabulary is about to change, thanks to a groundbreaking project by researchers at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, who have devised a way of relating such apparently subjective descriptions directly to the chemical composition of books. To conservators and historians alike, there is a unique difference to age, touch, and smell of, say, the warm, leathery English parchment versus the cold, sharper scent of Italian parchment. It all matters. Researchers use these Holmesian techniques to track age, decay, to create a book odor wheel. No joke, the book odor wheel is totally a thing. It allows researchers to take a subject and see how they react. From the analytical perspective, and given that coffee and chocolate come from fermented slash roasted natural lignin and cellulose-containing product, they share many VOCs, volatile organic compounds, with decaying paper, who combine the results with those of earlier research projects, such as studies of a 1940s visitor's book at the National Trust's Knoll House in Kent. Their study also took them beyond books themselves. To the places in which many of them are read, libraries. In another experiment, they asked visitors to the Wren Library in St. Paul's Cathedral to describe what the library smelled like to them. Everyone described its smell as woody, while 86% also experienced it as smoky, 71% as earthy, and just under half, 41%, reported the scent of vanilla, all smells associated with particular chemicals in old books. The life of individual books also affects their smell. How far they have traveled, whether they have been kept in damp or dry environments. Some manuscripts have hardly stirred from their original shelves since the day they were completed. Others have zigzagged across the known world in wooden chests or saddlebags, swaying on the backs of horses, or over the oceans in little sailing ships, or as aircraft freight. The researchers believe the historic book odor wheel could become a useful diagnostic tool for conservators across a wide range of areas, helping them to assess the condition of objects through their olfactory profile. If a book smells chocolatey, it's likely that it is releasing vanillin, benzaldehyde, and furfural, three chemicals associated with the degradation of the cellulose and linen in paper. But the study also has wider implications, as the heritage industry grapples with a new interest in the historical importance of smell. By documenting the words used to describe a heritage smell, our study opens up a discussion about developing a vocabulary to identify aromas that have cultural meaning and significance. This piece, almost all truth and a little bit of memory, with most of the truth being supplied by Claire Armistead in her piece, Can You Judge a Book by Its Odor, in The Guardian. Can You Judge a Book by Its Odor
