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Why do old books smell so good?
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoNowadays I would be curious, and rather worried, about known carcinogens in those old books. I remember buying in the 1990s a fantasy trade paperback from Tor Books that had an enchanting floral scent, such that I frequently stuck my nose into the book while reading. I don’t know if the publisher and author had deliberately used certain paper or treated it with a certain scent, or this was just a nice coincidence. But now I wonder if I was just giving myself cancer from some chemical that was considered innocuous at the time.
- Aperocky 3y agoEverything is basically giving you cancer according to California.
- wheelerof4te 3y agoEspecially Californians.
- zwieback 3y ago"There's no cure, there's no answer, everything gives you cancer!" One of the great Joe Jackson tunes.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoLife causes cancer. Which causes death. Not living life also causes death. In short, don’t fret about it. Enjoy it while you have it.
- wheelerof4te 3y ago"Not living life also causes death." Well, if you sit around all day and don't move much, sure. You will shorten your lifespan by a lot. Or you'll live long, boring life anyways since you have good genes. Nothing in life is certain.
- Dalewyn 3y agoThere are two certain things in life: Death and taxes.
- BoppreH 3y agoAnd I can enjoy life for longer if I don't live in a house with lead paint or e̶a̶t̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶a̶p̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ forget my teflon pan on the stove. I dislike platitudes like these that don't acknowledge that life is about tradeoffs, and sometimes a little caution gives large rewards.
- ghaff 3y agoOr deal with flaking paint in an old house--which inevitably does have lead paint that has been painted over.
- mardifoufs 3y agoYes but treating everything like possible lead paint is a sure way to live a miserable life. We need to be careful if there is proof of harm, not assume that everything is harmful.
- BoppreH 3y agoThat's a perfectly fine message, but the original post had none of the necessary subtlety. If your life advice could be used in a cigarette ad, you've diluted it too far.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoImmediately what I thought of was smoking cigarettes. Enjoy life but educate yourself about what can extend it and reduce it. Indulge (or not) with open eyes.
- postalrat 3y agoAre you enjoying life?
- BoppreH 3y agoNo joke, I'm writing this comment from a sunbed at the beach, watching the crystal clear water with loved ones around and a dog nestled at my feet. Yes, I'm enjoying life, thanks for asking :)
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoSure, but you should also probably avoid asbestos.
- navigate8310 3y agoDon't you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone!
- jjgreen 3y agoA friend of mine used to tell a story of when he was young, and asked an elderly relative at a family do how old he was, "67" he replied; "I wouldn't want to live to 67!", "You would if you were 66".
- j4yav 3y agoThose lead paint chips aren't going to eat themselves, live a little!
- pluijzer 3y agoI think I will not lie on my death bed regretting not having lived in a lead painted house, not having smoked or having showed some common sense. Also I think I will not be alone because of it.
- Balgair 3y agoI've had a few close family members pass from cancer. I was a caretaker during these times for them. Talking with them, changing them (people are really heavy!), feeding them, medicating them, bathing them, etc. We had very good hospice support and paid a lot for it, but during the pandemic, everything kinda went to shit, so it was up to me and a few others most of that time. Dying of cancer is unique to every person and their cancer's progression. But, from my own experiences, dying of cancer is a fucking horrible way to go. The pain is quite bad as it colonizes various nerve bundles and organs. Morphine only does so much and wanes as the person gets addicted to it and requires more and more to get the numbing results. As such, your mind goes with the morphine intake, a welcome relief really. You can lose function in your limbs and bowels too, though not always. You stop eating and drinking, but you don't stop thirst and hunger. Death really does become a welcome relief after enough weeks/months of this. Then there is the just normal health hazards and pains of laying down and generating filth. The rashes and sores, the muscle loss, the boredom. It's quite horrible. And that's with loving family members helping you at a moment's notice. One pro-tip here, if you can get a death doula. Look, I get the sentiment here. Yes, live your life, don't worry so much about how it's going to end. There's likely nothing you could have done different anyway. Your end is going to really suck, no matter what. Better to have it be quick and as painless as possible. But, I do want to advocate for taking common sense measures about carcinogen avoidance. Those are absolutely worth the time and effort. Do not smoke, don't have lead paint in your house, don't be stupid or lazy about getting these things away from you. Your future self will be very thankful you did that. I know, I've helped dying people who didn't.
- meristohm 3y agoI've been reading So Much For That, by Lionel Shriver, and the description of a slow decline due to mesothelioma has much in common with your experiences. I've learned more in the last week about what it might be like to have some of the many forms of cancer than I ever knew before.
- wizofaus 3y agoYes but some forms of death are a good deal worse than others. Many cancers in particular can be an awful way to go, especially when it's happening with your full knowledge of its inevitability and lack of ability to do anything about it. I'm not going to give up something I enjoy (or even the indirect benefits of using a particular substance) just to live a few extra years, but if doing so significantly reduces the chances of a drawn-out painful death, then there's surely an alternative worth looking for.
- david_allison 3y agoBe especially cautious around emerald green books. There's a possibility they contain arsenic http://wiki.winterthur.org/wiki/Poison_Book_Project http://wiki.winterthur.org/wiki/Poison_Book_Project https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/these-green-books-are-literally-poisonous https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/these-gre...
- foobarian 3y agoAnd this gem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624037
- agumonkey 3y agoGood point. In general pay attention to old stuff. Pathogens can be chemical or organic. And indirectly, there seems to be agent spread on books you get from amazon too. I have an old 80s english CS book that smells too bad, so much i get a light headache. (not too far from what you get from some made in china plastics). It may be anti-fugal treatment.
- snvzz 3y ago[flagged]
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoI was hoping this would be a copypasta but googling throws up nothing
- snvzz 3y agoIt indeed is a copypasta[0]. I became aware of it through the vtuber community. 0. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boysmell https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boysmell
- dools 3y agoThere’s another book smell which I noticed in lots of kids books when I was a kid, that totally smelled like vomit. For years I thought it was because kids barfed all the time but it turns out it was the printing chemicals and paper.
- Waterluvian 3y agoOh wow I forgot about that specific smell for 30 years and suddenly I can smell it again.
- vinyl7 3y agoI wonder if that's to prevent kids from eating the paper. Similar to Nintendo's cartridges having a bad flavor.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoParm also contains butyric acid.
- bruce343434 3y agoWhat's parm?
- behrlich 3y agoParmesan cheese
- purerandomness 3y agoWho calls Parmesan cheese "parm"? Is that a US thing?
- hanniabu 3y agoSo is it a health hazard to work in a museum library?
- wrp 3y agoIf you mean a library of old books, yes, it can be if toxic books are not properly handled.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoDepends if the building has Legionnaire's or asbestos. Moldy books also exist. Those can't be great for your lungs.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI wonder if there is something to that association, mentally I’ve been more into digital books my whole life, but before the last 10 years or so, my preference was seen as absurd by seemingly anyone that prided themselves in reading books I wonder if that book smell experience is core to those people I can smell it, and I remember it from being a kid too but the downsides to me outweighed it and I had choices then too. The downsides being that physical books don't keep their page and are uncomfortable to hold, more so for kid hands, and laying down in bed to read or trying to prop up a book exacerbated its technological inferiority. I always suspected for others that the smell was a greater part of the experience and association with reading a book. and maybe some prior social benefits doing it in public.
- ghaff 3y agoThere's some combination of snobbery, appreciating the tactile nature of physical books, and having bookshelves and piles of books in the house that appeal to many people. IMO ebooks are inferior for some purposes. Books that are meant to be appreciated as books--e.g. books of photography. Cookbooks in which I make notes and put stickies. Various other cases. But if I'm mostly just reading flowing text, especially fiction but non-fiction as well I appreciate a format that lets me carry a library in a form factor that's smaller than a hardcover and which I can easily read in any lighting conditions.
- hotnfresh 3y agoI think ereaders are a worse UI for all but wholly linear, light reading. If I’m reading some trashy fiction, ereaders don’t bother me—anything else, and they’re worse than a real book. The two-page-at-a-time interface is a ton better and enables features like facing-page translations or setting a full-page illustration or other graphic opposite some text. Got two (largish) books, you can have both open and visible at the same time, four total pages. Footnotes are a lot better in a real book. Typesetters can control formatting—text placement on the page, were page-turns fall, that kind of thing—much better, so poetry texts may be better in a real book. I find holding or marking an endnote or index section and flipping back and forth to that faster, and less error-prone than doing the same on an ereader. The book being a distinct physical object aids with memory. You see the title and author as it sits on the table in a room you’re occupying, even if you’re not reading it (I’ll often forget who wrote an ebook I’m reading, even if I’ve spent hours with it). Spatial memory is powerful. I not-uncommonly use it to locate parts of a book kinda by feel, like tracing a familiar but poorly marked trail in the woods. Ebooks feel like trying to find a particular spot on the open ocean, with no stars and out of sight of land. Full text search is the only directly book-related feature of ebooks that I think gives them an edge, but that’s no replacement for a good index, and if I had to pick only one of the two, I’d take the index. It’s pretty good, though. What remains in their favor is compactness, and boy is that a big advantage, so I do read ebooks even for some books I’d prefer to read on paper. But IMO the UI is, overall, a whole lot worse than a real book. [edit] oops, sold ebooks short on one point: you don’t need to hunt down separate large-print editions, with them. Same thing that makes them so bad for text that benefits from a human having taken care with text formatting and placement, makes them great if you need large print.
- amelius 3y agoKind of disappointing that we don't have the technology to store smells, say, in an iPad, and retrieve them when we open an e-reader app. Scent was the first sense that we acquired in evolution, yet the last one we technologically master.
- navigate8310 3y agoThis was exactly what I was contemplating when I read that article. I believe that olfactory-augmented innovations could undoubtedly enhance the value of devices that are currently only performing acrobatics (flipping and folding).
- amelius 3y agoDon't forget VR helmets.
- SapporoChris 3y agoThere have been multiple attempts at this. None have ever been successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_scent_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_scent_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_and_sniff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_and_sniff Novelty items at best, I can't imagine any VC getting excited about this stuff. But I didn't imagine they'd get excited about crypto either :)
- falcor84 3y agoTo actually synthesize the smell molecules would pretty much require (Star Trek) replicator levels of technology. Also, if/when we do have them, I'm sure that HN will fill up with inflammatory content about whether it's ok that the companies that make them only sell a "censored" model that disallows synthesizing toxins.
- amelius 3y agoI'm not sure if that is true. E.g. we might be able to synthesize smells like we cook food, where there is little to no danger of producing toxins from innocent ingredients.
- bighoki2885000 3y ago[dead]
- lonetools 3y agoApparently I wasn't the only one.
- jjgreen 3y agoThat smell makes me want to crap, and I'm not the only one: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/general-science/unbearable-poopness-bookstores https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/general-science/unbearable...
- braymundo 3y agoThis is fascinating. I always experienced this uh, urge. Glad to know I’m not a unique weirdo.
- jjgreen 3y agoFor me, old books in particular ... a bit of an issue as a researcher often needing to go into the deep stacks of the University library. I always had to, err, prepare myself, beforehand.
- danparsonson 3y agoWow I never knew this was a thing... thank you for sharing, I think :-)
- hoyd 3y agoI once blogged about the lack of word for this smell[0], and came across someone else that has asked this[1] too. Just like 'petrichor' for the smell of fresh earth following rain. I made up my own word for this, in Norwegian: 'Gammelbokduft'. [0] https://earth.hoyd.net/lukten-av-gamle-boker-118/ https://earth.hoyd.net/lukten-av-gamle-boker-118/ [1] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57416/word-for-the-smell-of-old-books http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57416/word-for-th...
- pohuing 3y agoDoes that just translate to rotting book smell?
- logdahl 3y agoI would say it translates to old book smell
- hoyd 3y agoYes, that would be it. The word "gammel" means most of the times old, but I can see where it would be used as something rotten too.
- mjochim 3y agoIn Scandinavian languages, gammel or a similarly-spelled cognate means "old". I dont know about rare cases where it might mean "rotten", I dont speak any of them well enough. But in German, "gammeln"/"vergammelt" doesnt mean old. It means to rot/rotten.
- carlmr 3y agoNot Norwegian but sounds like it to me, a German. In any case in German this is exactly how you'd create a new word. Gammeln (rotting) + Buch (book) + Duft (scent). Then you have Gammelbuchduft. In French maybe you can make it parfum de livre.
- nmeagent 3y agoThis article immediately brought to mind a particular conversation in season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer... Jenny: "Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?" Giles: "The smell." Jenny: "Computers don't smell, Rupert." Giles: "I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, 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."
- dhosek 3y agoThen there’s the scene in the beginning of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad Love Story where the protagonist is reading a book on an airplane and the young woman next to him complains about the smell.
- ktpsns 3y agoComputers can be smelly, too. Ever booted up your old Windows 95 box from the basement? The dust blown from the fans has a particular smell. It is even more dramatic for real vintage computing like punch card machines, which smell very oily, in a similar way like very old cars and planes.
- stpe 3y agoIndeed so. Once in my youth I brought my Amiga 500 to a friend's place, and he had a cat that peed on the edge of it. The computer was ok, but it was basically a flood of cat pee seeping in into the memory expansion slot underneath. Tried everything to get rid of the smell. Including perfume. Didn't make it better. Especially when it got hot. Still today, when I smell cat urine I instantly think of Motorola 68000 assembly.
- temac 3y ago> Still today, when I smell cat urine I instantly think of Motorola 68000 assembly. I did not expect to read that today. Or ever.
- 6stringmerc 3y agoWhy really really old books smell so bad: In the scribe days in England when literacy was exclusive and the texts and manuscripts were intricate and long-term artistic endeavors… …the most frequent sealant used was sheep urine. IIRC. Basically there’s a LOT of reasons to wear gloves and a mask in the kind of places where they are stored for longevity. Source: Early-Middle English course taught by an Oxford Man.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoAFAIK, this claim of requiring gloves when handling old and rare books is an outdated misconception [0] [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/arts/rare-books-white-gloves.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/arts/rare-books-white-glo... [1] https://ask.loc.gov/preservation/faq/337286 https://ask.loc.gov/preservation/faq/337286
- 6stringmerc 3y agoI’m not saying anything is mandatory and tradition in the English scholarship field is…curious. Source: inducted to Sigma Tau Delta last semester I think to cover their ass if I do something great eventually. The only STD i knowingly have.
- keepamovin 3y agoFisher library in Sydney Uni. Millions of volumes in open stacks over 9 (i think) floors. "Buzzing with knowledge and light" as someone said back on campus many years ago. Very cool place to just go hang out. It was where I first discovered some old worn copies of Murakami "Hear the Wind Sing" and "Pinball 1973" in English. Only place I've ever seen them in fact.
- rwl4 3y agoNot to be THAT guy, but I'm getting a definite ChatGPTish generative text feel from that article. The short sections, the FAQ restating the details from the article three paragraphs ago, etc. I hate to lead a witch hunt, but...
- brookst 3y agoDoes it matter, any more than it would matter if a human author was a 10 year old or a Nobel laureate?
- Matumio 3y agoYes, the author's background matters when judging the value of a text. A nobel laureate is usually correct about the basics of their own field. I wouldn't trust a 10 year old child's knowledge about poisons. Even though some 10 year old child somewhere might know their poisons better than most experts.
- xp84 3y agoI felt that the FAQs were definitely bolted on by an LLM. Maybe they were trying to pad it out?
- booleandilemma 3y agoYeah the FAQ section was weird and unnecessary. I figured it's some kind of SEO gimmick.
- canvascritic 3y agochatgpt vibes, huh? maybe the author's just a fan. or we're all bots in disguise. plot twist! On a side note, i can't help but wonder if, in a few centuries, someone will be analyzing the 'VOC' equivalent of old USB sticks to determine which early 2000s computer they came from
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AltruisticGapHN 3y agoAlways loved the smell of ink in books and graphic novels. Often times the first thing I do when I have a new book is just open it halfway and burry my nose in between the pages. Maybe it is a fetish? Hmmm. Never thought of that. I also always enjoyed smelling the gas at gas stations when I was a kid, would open the window. I do wonder if it's a psychological thing, or if there is really some chemical substance that is slightly addictive.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago>What chemicals cause that nostalgic old book smell? >Compounds like benzaldehyde, vanillin, ethylbenzene, and 2-ethyl hexanol are often responsible for old book scents. Benzaldehyde has an almond-like scent, vanillin smells like vanilla, ethylbenzene is sweet and plastic-y, and 2-ethyl hexanol is lightly floral. All of these are chemicals having very characteristic strong odors in their pure form, and can be somewhat overwhelming. Ethylbenzene is an Aromatic hydrocarbon normally found in major concentrations in some paints and thinners, and industrial felt-tip markers containing the xylene-based inks which are flammable, toxic and can make you dizzy breathing too much. 2-Ethylhexanol smells even worse, it's really rough. If you get one drop on your foot, you're going to want to leave your shoes outside when you get home. These kind of things just smell unique and are detectable in such low concentrations, plus can form a type of barely perceptible "bouquet" that imprints well enough to guide a potential effort toward its elusive source. I would have to estimate the dose makes the poison like so many other things. Freshly printed publications seem to have more solvent offgassing than aged materials.
- AltruisticGapHN 3y agoNow that reminds me also of the glue that we used in secondary school and also art school. Smelling it would definitely give a little high/dizzy feeling, whereas smelling the air at the gastation for me is more of a dopamine kick.
- kortex 3y ago> 2-Ethylhexanol smells even worse, it's really rough. If you get one drop on your foot, you're going to want to leave your shoes outside when you get home. I find it really fascinating the differences in subjective experience of various smells. Personally I find 2-EH to be sweet, almost sickly sweet but not overpowering, floral and vaguely fruity. It's not directly nice, like vanillin, but it's not bad, like pyridine or butyric acid.
- canvascritic 3y agoLignin breaking down smells nice, sure. but let's not forget, old books might be carrying mold spores that can trigger allergies or worse. Not to mention asbestos which was used in bookbinding till the 70s.
- sethammons 3y agoEvery now and then you realize people have vastly different base experiences. The smell of old books makes me crinkle my nose and take shallower breaths. I don't like it. Old dust is what I think of. Stale. My physical reaction has always made me assume it is bad for your health. Maybe hints of mold?
- wrp 3y agoI think there is something to this, as another comment mentioned the "soap/cilantro gene". I love the smell of old books, as described in TFA, but I know a guy who hates it. He describes it as you do, as the smell of dust. His taste in food is also quite different from mine, as in we actually seem to detect different things when eating the same food.
- demondemidi 3y agoI never understood this. They smell like old attics. Or old closets. Or, old people. None of which smell very good. I must have that soap/cliantro gene but for books.
- bigbacaloa 3y agoOld books don't smell good. They provoke allergies.
- brandonmenc 3y agoMy favorite scent maker sells one that captures this, and it's pretty good: https://www.cbihateperfume.com/306 https://www.cbihateperfume.com/306
- jrmg 3y agoHa! This post immediately made me think of this old gem: https://smellofbooks.com/ https://smellofbooks.com/ I’m glad someone made it real!
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoThe question of "what is old book smell?" is well answered. I was hoping to get some musings about why. That is, what is it about us that makes us associate those chemicals as positive? I think there can be coincidence. Some things just have a smell because like chemistry and such. The brain must represent that particular chemical signal somehow. But when it's a noteworthy smell, when it's the kind of thing people write articles about, I expect a little more. Truffles smell good to animals because if they didn't, animals wouldn't dig them up and help distribute the spores. Decaying meat smells bad to animals because if it didn't, we might eat it and get sick (that battle having been already lost to the decomposers). So with that in mind, why do old books smell so good?
- phero_cnstrcts 3y agoBecause they want to be read.
- nickpeterson 3y agoI don’t know, I think it’s not so much the smell but how distinctive it is, that mixed with knowing what it is (compared to something macabre) reinforces nostalgia. I think it also helps that many books are timeless
- inimino 3y agoPublishers wouldn't choose papers and ink that smelled bad. There's a lot of ways to make paper and ink, so it's not that surprising that we'd eventually nail the aesthetics.
- djmips 3y agoMy father worked in a paper mill and told me about the incredible fact that artificial vanilla was a byproduct of the forest industry! https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/vanilla_is_a_forest_industry_by_product https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/vanilla_is_a_forest_industry_b...
- djmips 3y agohttps://zanos.co.uk/news/sustainable-vanillin-from-the-forests-of-norway/ https://zanos.co.uk/news/sustainable-vanillin-from-the-fores...
- fauria 3y agoJordi Roca, pastry chef from 3 Michelin star restaurant El Celler de Can Roca, designed a dessert based on the scent of old books. He captures that characteristic smell using a technique called enfleurage, soaking an old book in a neutral fat and then distilling it using a device called Rotaval. He then pours some drops on thin wafers that resemble book pages. Here is a short video describing the process: https://youtube.com/shorts/zN2uHgX0rRA https://youtube.com/shorts/zN2uHgX0rRA
- resbaloso 3y agoNot particularly appealing for someone dealing with the [Marikio Aoki phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariko_Aoki_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariko_Aoki_phenomenon). Walking into a library and smelling old books triggers the urge to defecate for me.
- Tokumei-no-hito 3y agoThis is an incredible wtf article. It’s so absurd it has to be real, I don’t know how it could be made up.
- PaulBGD_ 3y agoOne data point, I’ve been affected by this for decades now. I had no idea before the article that others experienced it too.
- croisillon 3y agoWell that's interesting, i was in a paper shop this afternoon (i love paper shops), and i suddenly wanted to go to the bathroom and realized it happens often there!
- JohnBooty 3y agoWow, that's wild. Certain rooms do that to me. In the house where I grew up it was the upstairs room. (It wasn't the stairs themselves; no other stairs in the house did it) In our current home it's the basement. Sadly those rooms are not filled with books. I can't tell if it's a statistically real effect. I had always told myself it was not real, but having heard of "Marikio Aoki" phenomenon for the first time just now, I'm wondering...
- Solvency 3y agoWhat about Magic The Gathering cards? I started playing during Weatherlight as a kid and the smell of those cards was like crack for some reason. I'm sure it was just some carcinogenic chemicals though.
- nologic01 3y agoI was under the impression that all books smell "good" (or in any case, smells that are quite distinctive and generally not disagreeable). With time the scent changes. Together with the tactile feel of the densely stacked pages the physical experience of books is just phemomenal.
- webnrrd2k 3y agoI wish the artical attempted to address the "good smell" part of the title. I read this article and I didn't find it engaging... It lists some of the chemicals that cause the small. It's no suprise that there are aromatic chemicals that cause it. I would really like to know why they small good? Is it like petrichor? Childhood experiences that influence my perception?
- kortex 3y agoVanillin, benzaldehyde, and 2-ethylhexanol are all found in edible plants, and in particular, those three smell very good. Paper is wood pulp (natively comprising lignocellulose) where the lignin has been broken down. The lignin breakdown products are primarily polyphenols (the building blocks of lignin), including vanillin and related compounds, which for whatever reason smell really good to us. The smoky smell of wood char and campfires? Polyphenols.
- mimd 3y agoWe just need a Franciscan friar with a melodious Scottish voice and we're all set for a murder mystery.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoWhatever it is, I’d you concentrate it 10000x and inject it in mice it probably causes cancer.
- kristianp 3y agoI remember Dr Dobbs journals in the 90s would have a strange plasticy smell. Whenever I smell that smell in a new book I have memories of the newsagent I used to buy them from and nostalgia for the enjoyment a new issue would bring.
- jjw1414 3y ago“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go”. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. After reading this as a kid, I always found this to be true. In particular, the public library pulp paperbacks on those rotating wire racks back in the 1980s.
- Deprogrammer9 3y agoMy great great grandmothers house smelled like old books. Very found memories as a child associated with this very special sent. :)