In praise of the “smell of books”…

/BORGES’ LIBRARY OF BABEL/ Satheesh Balachandran: I don’t want to dismiss a person’s love for the feel of paper, the smell of paper, or even the look of a book…

In praise of the “smell of books”…

Have you been avoiding “e-books” because they just don’t smell? If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the ‘e-book bandwagon’, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted ‘digital books’ because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.

The thing I remember most: The smell of library books. I can’t identify the particulars of the smell of library books. It’s not just the smell of the paper they’re printed on, it’s more than that. It’s the smell of page-turn sweat, infused painstakingly in each page of a thriller novel, the spilled ingredients hastily swabbed off the pages of a recipe book, the oil embedded in the binding of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, by the guy who threw the book across his garage, when he realized it didn’t contain instructions on how to fix his Yamaha two-stroke engine. It’s the smell of people who care about learning something new.

Smells like Literary Spirit

Some people reckon sniffing books is a bit of a fishy fetish. But I scent a sweeter story, bound up with books' power to enchant. Does this get up your nose, too?

There I was, reading On Opera by the late philosopher Bernard Williams, and I was suddenly transported back to my childhood. How so? Because of the way it smelled. I must have subconsciously caught a whiff, which led me to put the open book right up to my nose and breathe in deeply. Cue the mental equivalent of a cheesy dissolve in a cheap TV drama: suddenly I'm nine years old again. And somehow the odour links to a very specific set of books: Susan Cooper's magnificent The Dark Is Rising series. (Kids these days who have to make do with Harry Potter don't know they're born.) How to describe why one book smells nicer than another? I could burble on about the Williams book's hints of musk, fresh grass, and topnotes of vanilla, but you can see that I'd never make it as a wine writer.

But maybe there is a secret community of book-sniffers out there who know what I mean. Scientists are always telling us that the olfactory sense is more important than we think: There is a theory, for example, that we choose a long-term sexual partner based in large part on odour, and we like someone's smell if their immune system is complementary to our own, so that offspring will get the best protection possible. Different kinds of books have characteristic smells, too, from the no-nonsense, almost newspapery tang of cheap paper and ink of a paperback thriller, to the high-class, sweet-polish aroma of the glossy coffee-table book.

Sometimes, on the other hand, a brand-new book will just smell nasty: almost mouldy, or pungently of glue, or like school chemistry lab. As my experience showed, what wafts from the pages can be just as powerful a time-travel machine as Proust's madeleine. And there's another possibility, too. If smell can influence our romantic choices, might it also influence our critical faculties? As a reviewer, might I subconsciously write more kindly about books whose smell I prefer? I fear I can't rule it out. Could publishers employ parfumiers to give their books a commercial fillip? Perhaps they secretly do already...

Of course, writing about this sort of thing marks you out in some quarters as a luddite, labouring under some kind of irrational, fetishistic attraction to the book-as-object which must be jettisoned in the exciting digital age. New media guru Jeff Jarvis thinks so, anyway: "And let's deal with that smell meme now: there is nothing in the smell of books that adds to learning and enjoyment. We associate that smell with reading the way we associate the smell of vinyl with a new car. I'll bet our children have the same association of wonder and enrichment with the sight of a white screen or the smell of a laptop overheating."

Well, maybe. Or maybe I'd be more convinced by Jarvis's writing if it smelled of fresh coffee. I was delighted to see, in fact, that someone has taken this subject seriously enough to write a book about it: Hans J. Rindisbacher's "The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature". I do hope the University of Michigan Press did him the honour of making sure it smells really nice.

~ Steven Poole