I previously chalked up my predilection for inhaling timeworn, musty books to nostalgia. How did his team go about extracting this vaporous data? In an experiment setup at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the overwhelming majority of 79 participants reported that the smell of old books reminded them of chocolate and coffee.
The response took researchers by surprise, but the correlation came up again at another library. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Makeover Takeover: Colonial Comeback. Treat Your Family to Homemade Cupcakes. Getty Images. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses.
You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano. Volunteers blindly sniffed extracts from the book, plus seven other unlabeled scents ranging from chocolate and coffee to fish market and dirty linen.
Afterward, participants filled out a survey with a question asking them to describe the smell of the historic book. Without knowing what they were smelling, more than a third of the 79 participants said the old book extract reminded them of chocolate.
Coffee was the second most reported scent, according to the study in the journal " Heritage Science. For another part of the study, volunteers described the smell of the library at St. Participants filled out questionnaires as soon as they walked into the space, before their noses could get used to the scent. First, they rated the intensity and appeal of the library, then picked out individual smells.
The volunteers marked if they could sense any of the 21 smells the researchers picked out from a VOC analysis and could fill in the blank with their own descriptions too. The library scents were decidedly different from the book aromas. Beetles can produce neat, tiny round holes, frequently along the spines of books; but they are also capable of mazes of destruction that meander through the helpless pages.
Silverfish graze across the surface of paper and cloth, which leads to a scraped appearance or irregular holes. Some pests burrow straight down; some appear to wander erratically, almost calligraphically. Some trails can seem to resemble lace; others call to mind a Rorschach test or land elevations on a map. Mice shred paper for nests, and their feces and urine pose the threat of disease.
Besides the holes, the excretions and secretions of pests can stain pages, lure other pests, or leave a smell—and not the good kind. Bookworms have been the scourge of libraries and book owners for millennia. Early scribes used parchment, a writing medium usually made from the untanned skins of goats and sheep.
Vellum, a finer-quality version, is made from the skins of calves. Their appetites and habits were recorded as far back as ancient Greece. Bookworms were still annoying scholars 2, years later. Natural philosopher Robert Hooke devotes an engraving to the bookworms he studied under early microscopes in his Micrographia These days, ammonia-based pastes and alum additives repel book-eating pests, so bookworms tend to be more of a problem for rare-book curators and collectors.
In the age of e-books and tablets the idiosyncrasies of a printed book, let alone a decaying one, are erased. There is, of course, a trade-off to innovation. Readers experience a certain intimacy and form a different relationship with a work when they turn the fragrant, worn, or chewed-up pages of old books, witnessing in tangible ways the damage exacted by time.
Our fingers follow the waves of a warped cover or probe the latticework left by worms. We hear the crack as we open the dried spine of an aged volume or the whisper of fingers pulled gently across a smooth, dog-eared page. And, of course, we breathe in the beloved, beguiling old-book smell. How a steam-powered automobile in snuffed out the life of the brilliant naturalist and astronomer Mary Ward.
Skip to main content. Podcast Video About Subscribe. By Ann Elizabeth Wiener March 26, Science History Institute. Related Topics. More in Culture Cabinets for the Curious Culture. Cocktails Culture.
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