But it was still surprising to see that reference come up again and again.”īembibre also tested what people thought of the smell of the library at St. “And also, the VOC’s of chocolate and coffee seem to be very similar to that of books. “You tend to use familiar associations to describe smells when they are unlabelled,” Bembibre says. The fact that the participants named chocolate wasn’t surprising to the researchers, though the frequency that they identified chocolate and coffee with eau de book was. This is where the vast majority of the 79 people interviewed identified old books as smelling kind of like chocolate. ©National Trust / James Dobsonīembibre, the corresponding author on the paper, and Strlič partnered with the U.K.’s leading conservation organization, the National Trust, to set up an experiment where visitors to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery were participated in a test of unlabeled (and concealed) smells. Cecilia Bembibre extracting the smell of a 18th century bible in the Spangled Bedroom at Knole House. Strlič partnered with heritage scientist Cecilia Bembibre to start looking not only at the chemical traces of the books, but also at how the smells affected the people that were smelling them. After taking a sample and running it through a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer combination, Strlič and colleagues were able to identify key smell components in the books. But in this case, they detected tiny variations in the chemical compositions of very old books. Those compounds can also be detected by sensors-the same kinds of mechanical sensors used by governments to sniff out drugs or explosives. Our noses pick up those chemical signatures and our brains interpret them as smells. Materials like books often release small amounts of volatile organic compounds (or VOC’s) into the air. “I thought, surely we can develop some scientific techniques that are more accurate than the human nose,” Strlič says. Matija Strlič smells a 17th-century book at the National Archives of The Netherlands. Strlič-who was also trained as a conservator-was intrigued, and started looking for a way to quantify those odors. When he asked them why, the researchers said they could tell a lot about the type of materials used in the books by the smell. It started a few years ago when chemist Matija Strlič noticed paper conservators stopping to smell the pages of works they were studying. In a study published Thursday in Heritage Science, researchers at the University College London’s Institute for Sustainable Heritage examined the smell of books and libraries, putting together a classification scheme that could help characterize the scents of the past-and maybe even diagnose deteriorating books before damage gets out of control.
What does a book smell like? Freshly printed books might smell of paper and ink, but older books have a sweet, musky smell that wafts into a book-lovers nose and lingers.Īnd apparently, it reminds a lot of people of chocolate. Sampling the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of a historic book at the Heritage Science Lab in UCL.
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