Nose In a Book

BY ELLIANNA CIERPIOT

What do bookish perfumes tell us
about the role of the book in a world
that no longer needs them?

The Morgan Library and Museum

“Sweeter than thy unguents and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is the smell of those old books of mine,” -Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac

In 2017, perfumer Carlos Benaim attempted to bottle the scent of the Morgan Library. After taking samples from the woodwork, the bricks of the fireplace, and other areas of the building’s historic 1906 entrance, Benaim and his students turned to the collection of rare books in an attempt to capture something often remarked upon but rarely defined— book smell. In 1992, Kate Ericson and Mel Zeigler commissioned Felix Buccelatto to create scents based on the National Archives, as an installation art piece. Karl Lagerfeld and Geza Schoen created Paper Passion in 2011 as an interpretation of the offices of German publisher Steidl. Indie fragrance houses like Sorce and Imaginary Authors’ bookish releases sit on the shoulders of giants like Margiela’s Whispers in the Library and Byredo’s Bibliotheque, and marketplaces like Etsy are beset by perfumes claiming to embody specific texts from literary classics to werewolf romances. What all of this reveals to me is a growing desire in both the art and fragrance worlds for book smell as a commodity, which I think is a response to the precarity of material books in a digital space.

Today, scent often distinguishes a ‘real’ book from imitative digital books. We describe digital books by what they lack: pages, the searchability of the codex, and most importantly smell. To smell a book is an embodied experience that many readers associate with a heightened level of intimacy and is a cornerstone of bookish identity in a digital world.

Jessica Pressman coined the term “bookishness” as a manifestation of the want for physical books in a world that no longer needs them. In a material sense, bookishness is made up of “creative acts that engage the physicality of the book within a digital culture, in modes that may be sentimental, fetishistic, radical.” A phone case that looks like a clothbound Dracula, or shirts with Shakespeare quotes on them, for example. Recently I have been thinking about how many perfumes are presented as smelling like a book, and what the origin of this is. In order to understand our 21st century love for book smell, we must look at a historical precedent of book smell, which emerged alongside literary antiquarianism in the nineteenth century.

At this time, many notable bibliophiles’ accounts of their collections centered not just on the literary content, but the material aspects of their books. The jewel in any bibliophile’s hoard was the fine smell of rare old books. Nineteenth-century bibliophiles and book-collectors enjoyed a physical connection with their books as well as an emotional one, facilitated chiefly by smell. The crisp, woody scent of paper, or the suede of vellum, and the sweet resinous leather binding create a multisensorial component to the experience of a book, just as important as the words on the page.

In Anatomy of Bibliomania, turn-of-the-century antiquarian Holbrooke Jackson collects observations about book-smell. English novelist George Gissing shared that he “knew every one of his books by its scent; he had but to put his nose between the pages and be reminded of all sorts of things.” On the other hand, Valery Larbaud suspects book-smell to be indicative of bibliophilia’s inherent superficiality, pointing out that “the fine smell of some when they are new,” is its own kind of prize for collectors, who even go “so far as to perfume them, when they have lost their odor.”

I spent a summer in the archives touching and smelling Nineteenth-century books of every quality, from lavishly bound collector’s editions to chapters that were sold on the streets of Victorian London for a shilling. I couldn’t stop thinking about perfume— specifically why there are so many fragrances that claim to emulate a book, and why academic discussions of smell and bookishness completely ignore the role of perfume. Pressman and other scholars of bookishness consider candles and even bath salts, but there is a distinct lack of perfume, which baffles me because bookish perfumes are truly everywhere, and their marketing reveals how we think about the material aspects of the book object.

I conceptualized this essay while working on research about material scrapbooking culture in three archives: Grinnell College’s Special Collections, The Huntington Library, and the Newberry Library. Every bookish fragrance I try is levied against my mental imaginary of what those rare books smell like. For those curious, the closest analogue I’ve found to the fourth floor of the Newberry (where the Special Collections are) is Tome, from Pineward Perfume. The marketing on Pineward’s website specifies which type of binding glue (Jade 403 PVA glue) and the use of a “vintage book accord that is based on headspace chemical analysis of old books and libraries”— a similar technique to what Benaim used in the Morgan Library. With perfumes like these, authenticity and nostalgia are part of what is sold to the consumer.

Book smell reflects a problem with sensorial literature that Hans J. Rindisbacher identifies in The Smell of Books: the lack of a dedicated vocabulary to describe smell. This concept is infamous in perfume writing: you may have heard someone say there is no “blue” for smell. We instead describe smells by where they come from or what they smell like. Something smells like coffee, or like gasoline, or like a rainy day— this is an example of metonymy, where we denote the origin of a scent as a description of that scent. To take this concept to its logical conclusion, the scent also becomes a signifier for the object itself. The ‘smell of books’ does not denote a specific set of fragrance notes (or determiners within a paradigm), but instead an origin, an imaginary kind of ideal old book which comes from bookishness the same way that a vase shaped like a copy of Jane Eyre is not a copy of Jane Eyre and never has been.

Book smell perfume is not unique among fragrance for being imitative, as all perfume is wonderfully engaged in fakery. “Old book” as a fragrance note is no different from other fantasy notes which are pervasive these days. I am reminded here of Baudrillard’s concept of a simulacra, which is a copy of something with no original, or an original that is so detached from the copy that the recreation becomes, to us, more real. The fact of book perfume being facsimile does not interest me so much as why, like these bookish objects, we buy and wear them. It is the purest expression of bookishness, as the recreation of the book object becomes part of the wearer’s own body. Therein lies the complication with book smell perfume: it is a reference to an imaginary kind of book, supplanting the real. Simulated book smell is “never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself,” in a cycle where the smell, not the object, takes the role of the origin. That presumed origin is simulated cyclicly until the physical book exists more in the imaginary space of utopian nostalgia than in the material world, and the book is presumed extinct by our effort to valorize its memory through perfume. Thinking back to Baudrillard, “when the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”

The sweet aroma given off by old books is owed chiefly to the chemical similarity between lignin, the chemical result of paper decomposition, and vanillin. Cheaper paper, containing more woodpulp, breaks down faster and creates a stronger, sweeter smell— the kind of smell emulated in ‘old book’ perfumes. In a sense, these accords are a bittersweet irony, as the smell that comes with the physical death of the book is used to celebrate its legacy. The book we smell in these fragrances is an endangered animal nearing extinction. A special collections librarian I worked with told me his biggest issue with bookish perfumes is that they evoke the archivist’s nightmares of dust and decay.

Perfume is a medium generally concerned with memory, which further complicates the role of bookish perfumes, straddling the perfumer between the roles of artist and archivist. When we (re)create a material object in fragrance, the perfumer is beholden to both the imagined ideal of the object and its material qualities. It is difficult to recall an isolated odor because the associations made by odors are contextual, made with an object within that context, and thus can function as a kind of “repository of stored memories,” writes archivist Anna Chen. The individual memory-holding power of smells can also contribute to “communal smell-memories,” such as when we all reminisce on book smell, or mourn its absence. The goal of the perfume, then, becomes about both representation and preservation, in the same way that our perfumes may one day preserve the smell of endangered or extinct plants in our climate crisis. These scents are “documents” of something precarious which may soon blink out of existence.

Are all bookish fragrances an intentional attempt at archiving the book’s material properties? Certainly not, but the act of purchasing and wearing them, I think, indicates a subconscious one. If we can understand part of the instinct of both perfume and bookishness as preservation through memory, then this becomes clear. Nostalgia for the book object supplants our real experiences, and becomes a way to badge oneself as more erudite and analog. Fragrances like Clue Perfumery’s Warm Bulb are some of the first to nostalgize the electric, something I predict a lot of in the future of perfume as our digital landscape becomes increasingly cold and frictionless. I don’t think we will ever live in a bookless, paperless world, but the codex is no longer the default. Book smell has become less of a byproduct of a literary experience and more of a thing one must consciously choose to experience, and these perfumes speak to the desire to be the kind of person who chooses that— I love them, personally, and I will keep searching for the fragrance that captures my book nostalgia, however nebulous a thing that may be.

Ellianna Cierpiot is a writer, perfume lover, sewist, and educator living in Kansas City, Missouri. They write and read about Victorian literature, the history of the book and collecting, fashion past and present, and fragrance. You can find them on Instagram @ellianna.ruth.