The smell of books
I can always smell the books when I walk past Blackwell’s main bookshop in Oxford’s Broad Street – the scent of new volumes lined up on shelf after shelf inside. And outside the Taylorian on St Giles I sometimes can make out the smell of library books drifting onto the pavement too.
New books come in several categories, with different notes, built of paper and ink, like a typology of bookish scents. Old books have their own characters, reminiscent of other books I’ve held and plunged into, as well as evoking their own personal history. Sometimes one of those scents recalls specific times, of long, lazy summers spent reading in a deckchair perhaps, almost hearing the pigeons cooing in the pine trees above as I take a deep breath in.
In his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig defines ‘yeorie’ as ‘a certain scent that has the power to sweep you back to childhood’. Books can do that. They can travel with us, accompany us whether physically or through the words and stories engraved in our memories, but their smell, or that of another sibling book, can also transport us back to another time.
Last year the Weston Library in Oxford had an exhibition of ‘Sensational Books’, all about the multi-sensory qualities of books. This, of course, covered smell, with exhibits including the bottled scent of the Bodleian’s Duke Humphrey’s Library, recognisable to anyone who’s had the privilege to visit it. At an evening event themed around the exhibition a friend and I took part in a workshop on smell, based on research into olfactory heritage. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. How to capture and conserve scents as part of the character of a place… and how smells affect how we feel about places and objects, the memories and emotions they evoke.
I love perfume, and am always torn between trying new ones and sticking to a signature scent. I wear L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain, precisely because it is an ‘old’ scent, first created in 1912. I like to feel a connection to times past. Though the formulation has changed, the continuity feels meaningful, full of the untold stories of other women’s lives.
Books too have this connection to the past, from the texts or illustrations to the books, as objects, themselves. The dusty, sweet and musty scent of an old book speaks of its life, its travels from hand to hand or settled existence on a private bookshelf, while fresh ink on paper recalls centuries of printing and binding texts and stories.
The smell of a library, like the sample smell I took home from that event, is made up of multiple books and tales, of a myriad histories, brought into one place. Each book too is its own place, to travel and get lost in, hands on paper, the sound of pages turning, and, of course, the smell.
Further reading:
Can you judge a book by its odour? in The Guardian
Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
Sensational Books exhibition
Odeuropa research project
