The Smell of a Good Book

When I was younger, I was obsessed with maintaining some sort of lifestyle that predated my own. I would refuse to type anything, stating that I preferred to hand write my work (since entering the teaching profession, I have apologised to my old English teacher, having had the experience of marking hand written course work) and that typing is just not as expressive and is too cold a medium.

Long story short, I'm writing this on my ipad, which I bought to replace my netbook, which I find rather slow and clunky. Im frustrated because my desktop pc is broken, and my kindle is my portable library. So there we have it, I am a techno fiend (not the music, that's just awful.)

How does this link to the smell of a good book? Well, let's consider books. They're aesthetically very pleasing in all their shapes and sizes, from slim volumes of poetry, to thick novels and huge tomes. They can make a room feel more homely, when they populate it's shelves. And, as an open and avid bibliophile, the smell of a good book is divine; it is ambrosia. But that is the mere object of a book. A book is merely a box full of paper, but what it represents is knowledge, communication.

I love books and I love the way they smell, but we're living in a digital age and the physical object of a book is becoming archaic and, in some cases, obsolete. It has come to a point now, where i have filled almost three rooms with my books, and my collection is

expanding steadily. If it weren't for my Kindle and ipad, then I feel confident in saying that my love of books, coupled with my love of hoarding, would overrun my life.

Perhaps the main reason I find books so homely and so comforting is that they represent journeys. Not always physical journeys, but journeys of learning, of emotional development, of growth. A great book is like a ballet; it doesn't matter whether or not you know whats coming next, it's about the beauty of watching the plot unfold. The smell of a good book is, in my opinion, a psychological side effect to the comfort one takes from the familiar; a mere symptom.

It is a symptom from which I suffer greatly, and yet I am aware of it's nature and I am willing to embrace the future. Really speaking, there's more to a book than what you hold; thats mere aestheticism. I think that people who really love reading will not shy away from the advent of electronic book. Rather, they will embrace it, as it takes us that one step closer to universal inclusion, because books will be even easier to access.

The smell of a good book is a wonderful thing,but it is a mere by-product of that for which a true bibliophile searches: understanding.

*****

It starts in a forest. A vast forest where all kinds of beautiful wildlife lives and dies.

Each tree in this forest is significant for life to thrive. Anything from the smallest mite to the mightiest ape. Each tree gives it's all to not only survive but feed and shelter each living organism that surrounds it.

And the trees are happy to do this. They know that by treating the encompassing life well. By giving a squirrel it's nuts, by giving a woodpecker it's hide-y hole, by giving the possum it's tree sap, it is also giving itself the means to carry on. It has a purpose. It gives life so it's species can carry on.

For every animal it helps, it is one step closer to creating and sowing it's seeds, using the animals around it to spread its life-pellets further and further so it can grow and grow. And grow some more.

This beautifully simple idea, yet delightfully complex action is not only true for the trees in the forest, but every plant and weed.

Then modern man came along with a yearning for information. Information about everything. Any information about any process, any technique, any thing. Anything.

They developed a way to preserve this information. The written word. They also found a way to preserve the written word. They developed papyrus.

This papyrus was made out of the very trees and plants that grew in the vast forest. On this papyrus, they wrote how to make papyrus using the vast forest. And then they wrote all sorts of things, factual or fictitious. All types of information that could be absorbed and used or enjoyed.

Papyrus that was filled with as much information about a topic was bound, and then called a book.

If you are to flick through a book, close to your nose, there's a mysterious and enchanting smell. That smell is the memory of the vast forest and it's truly beautiful. It's filled with the combined wisdom and life of the forest and the scribe of the documenter. It is "The smell of a good book".

The amount of information that was documented grew exponentially which sadly resulted in the decrease of the vast forest. So much so that it was then renamed; the forest.

An attempt to preserve the forest is currently ongoing. A process called recycling is being utilized. The process is also written on papyrus. Recycling is technique which involves cleaning and reusing older materials and it's used for a great variety of materials used today.

In the case of papyrus, the recycling process dilutes the beautiful smell of life and wisdom that's bestowed in by the forest. And that is why books today will never be truly great, for they will never have, The smell of a good book.

*****

Hello and welcome back to the very first episode of Smell That Book. I hope you all enjoyed the ad break, made yourself a cup of tea and put the dog out the back because there will be little opportunity for such things from this point on.

Now, to me, the smell of a good book means nothing. I was never a very strong reader (I’m still not) nor have I had such an amazing moment with a book that its odour has stuck with me. I have such memories with food, especially food that I have painstakingly cooked from scratch but as much as I have loved the recipe book the dish came from I could not tell you what it smelt of (other than grease and flour). I can recall the smell of important people from my life, be it a perfume they wore or the cigars they smoked, but smelling the books they once owned that now reside on my shelves do not conjure up feelings or emotions. Even as I write this, I am nose deep in a tome I have taken from my cupboard trying to gain some insight into the wondrous world of Eau de Novelle but all I can think of is that Silverfish must not suffer from body odour.

So what am I going to write about? (I pause to think, as the question was as much for me as it was for you, the reader). It could be, now that I take a second glance at the title, that I have been getting this all wrong. The phrase is ‘the smell of a GOOD book’. Could it be that what I have been doing is smelling books that are not considered good? How does one judge this? I have always been of the mind that a book is good if the reader has enjoyed it, and that one person may consider a book good while someone else may think the opposite. But perhaps this is not the case. Perhaps a book is put through its paces even before it’s published (picture a little library assault course) to determine where on a scale of 1 to Stephanie Mayer the book should be, 1 being very good and Stephanie Mayer being fucking awful. And perhaps depending on a books position on the scale they are given different scents, immediately altering our perception on a book. Maybe a good book is given an appealing aroma, enticing us to read on, tricking the senses, whereas a bad book would be given a stench designed to force our subconscious into finding problems with the book, such as bad grammar or ridiculous sentence structure, leading us to discard the book. Perhaps this is the origin of ‘That book stinks’, a phrase commonly used by overzealous American book critics.

Does this theory explain why I cannot recall the smell of a single book? No. Although, perhaps at the centre of the scale, where the books are neither good nor bad, they have no added scent, leaving the readers to make their own minds up. It’s a possibility for sure, but I don’t think it would stand up in a court of law. You see, a lot of the books I have read are the same books that my friends have read. Friends that have fond memories of smelling said books for the first time. I have been there and had their copies wafted under my nose, and while they’ve writhed in ecstasy I have sat there, unmoved by the gust of wind rushing up my nostrils.

Here is another theory (I am a scientist after all) which I think fits the scenario a little better. Maybe the term good book is used in the same way as it is when referring to religious texts. To understand this, I had to first think about what makes a religious text ‘good’. Firstly, what do all these books have in common? (That’s right, you clever bastards) They’re all big. So big is good. They are also the most circulated texts in existence with millions of copies made daily. So high sales is also a good thing. Lastly, they all have catchy titles e.g. The Bible, The Torah, The Origin of Species (that’s a joke for all the atheists in the room). So titles that start with ‘The’ are epic good. The other thing with religious texts is that they are appreciated and cared for by the people that read them. So if we now compare these to the books that, hypothetically, are in question. Most of these books are large books, if not in volume then in word count. Most of them are books that are widely read and have huge sales worldwide. They also fit the description of having catchy titles e.g. The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Complete Collection of Conan (the last one is kind of cheating as it’s a descriptive title but it’s the book that most resembles a religious text). My friends take care of their books and really know how to appreciate the prose. Like I said at the start, I was always a weak reader and have lost more books than I’ve actually read.

What I think is happening, if the latter theory is correct, is that I have been cursed with an inability to sniff the scripture. Whoever the divine power is, be it God, Allah or Edgar Allan Poe, they have deemed me unworthy to enjoy the full experience of a good book. Through neglecting the written word in its purest form I have lost my right to its gratifying fragrance. Perhaps, as I write this and expect others to appreciate what I’ve written, I may at some point in the future be gifted a pardon and for once experience that ever elusive book-uet (like bouquet but with books).

Or maybe I’ll never get this Kindle to work properly. Good night.

*****

I have a kindle, I like gadgets, and I embrace progressive technology enabling books to be read in a progressive way. As technology improves, books as a medium will evolve. It was noted on Stephen Fry's Planet Word documentary that as handheld e-readers improve we will see books that incorporate video and extensive footnotes, clips of music and similar. There are already books rife with hyperlinks, and it isn't difficult to imagine the benefits of textbooks where the references in the bibliography lead to the actual articles or papers themselves. These improvements would make studying easier and reading more fun.

Already on the kindle it is possible to see sections of text underlined if they have been highlighted by a number of readers. I'm not sure how I feel about that, hopefully it's a feature that can be turned off; I'd like to come to my own conclusions, and how I read a section of text will definitely be affected if I am aware many people felt it noteworthy.

As much as I enjoy e-readers, for me, personally, they are currently missing something. However this is not informed by practicality or sense, rather it is a hipster coolwank pretention. Much like musos who prefer cds to mp3, and the older who prefer cassette to cd, and the older who prefer vinyl to cassette, and the yet older who prefer music boxes to vinyl, I prefer books. I think it's likely a preference which will take longer to shift culturally, for in comparison to these evolving music recording formats which evolved over a comparatively short period the book has existed in a largely unchanged format for a large number of years.

So, in what ways do books differ to e-readers? In every material dimension the variety of books make them artefacts I delight in, and while the all-in-one nature of e-readers is also something that pleases me, books of paper and ink stimulate so many more of my senses. I have a colossal gospel tome of the Lord of the Rings, with tiny print despite its giant size, a long bound bookmark fraying at the edge, bounteous illustrations taking up entire pages. It is a beautiful book. It frustrates me somewhat as its size excludes it from one of my favourite pastimes: reading in the bath, however it makes up for this by sitting unused for months, years, and then upon re-discovery it has amassed a layer of dust, allowing me to blow it off, imagining that this is an ancient text I have discovered in an ancient ruin or storehouse. On the other end of the scale I have books from the Penguin Popular Classics series, which were printed cheaply in order to make them more available. Old plays and novels have in this way been shrunk into tiny, thin volumes that suit my pastime magnificently. In this way old bastions of literature stand pamphlet sized, and are a far more valuable and rewarding than anything committed to a flyer. I'd be more likely to frequent a pizza place or an indian restaurant which posted The Picture of Dorian Gray around the neighbourhood instead of their own tacky lists of food.

As well as their dimensions, the texture of books are also wildly varied. The plastic smoothness of dustsheets, the childish joy of running your hands over raised title text, like finding a shiny Ole Solskjaer in a packet of stickers. The simple pleasure of running your finger down the edge of the body of pages, watching them flick quickly back, enjoying the whirr of the motion and the breeze created. Joy. There is no better way to up the anticipation of a new journey about to begin within the pages.

But of all our senses, the most strangely powerful is smell. The olfactory stimulus can drag us back in time like no other. Perhaps that's slightly exaggerating; a film watched in childhood rewatched much later can warp us as well, and an album or a song repeatedly listened to can warp us back to the time and place when we hear it years later. For example Ghostbusters 2 turns me into a child as I watch it, and Tenacious D's Tribute takes my back to my teenage bedroom, playing Championship Manager 01/02 on an old PC. But from my experience so many more books can achieve this effect.

And regardless of this effect, I fucking love the smell of a good book. Even the smell of a shit one. I was shocked when I smelt a Twilight book, as despite knowing that it was a collection of written parp, I was shocked to discover that it smelt like a real book. Such is the power of smell, it can positively augment a good book, and it can even cover the reek of a poor book and bestow upon it the credibility of paper, glue and ink.

I recently re-read the first R.A. Salvatore book, The Crystal Shard, and as well as being pleased at how well it stood the test of time and very much enjoying it, I was surprised by its smell. 'Oh yes' I thought, 'this is the smell of fantasy'. And I was surprised by how right I was. Perusing the limited stock I have at my disposal, I am right now smelling Weis & Hickman's Dragon Wing (raised golden title text - delicious) and though it is, of course, the smell of paper, ink and glue, it also smells of fantasy. Also at hand I have Raymond E. Feist's Magician, and it smells exactly the same way. Why should this be!? All these books are from different publishers, and yet they smell exactly the same way. It is as though a secret council of fantasy elders convened and decided "this is how we want fantasy to smell", and so it does.

Koushun Takami's Battle Royale has pages which are unusually white. It has a cold smell, slightly sanitise and lacking in personality. Like a hospital ward or a government building. The cover is a deep red, glossy with a dimpled title. It fits the story magnificently. I have a number of Haruki Murakami books, mostly through the Vintage label, and to me the smell of them is the ultimate smell of comfort. It is the nasal equivalent of putting on the comfiest of pyjamas and hibernating deep in bed. Final Fantasy VII is my gaming equivalent of this. Thanks to the portableness of books, and FF7s release on the PSP I can have this sensation whilst actually in comfy pyjamas and in bed, but I daren't risk it lest I slip into an eternal coma of comfort. Or die as it is also known.

The book which has most moved me nasally recently is Richard Dawkins' The Magic of Reality. Ostensibly a book for older children it is, frankly, utterly majestic. Each page is glossy and rich with colour, and smells of recent redecoration. If you like reading and sniffing paint, I would suggest firstly that you stop sniffing paint, but while you're going cold turkey you can work your way intellectually and olfactorily through this tome. With it's dustsheet off it is a pleasing pale yellow, and at the risk of looking like a lunatic I could very easily simply touch it for an entire hour and be pleased. I would argue that e-readers simply aren't a substitute for that.

E-readers are cool and functional, but they simply don't (yet) have the capacity for exciting me fully in the material world. My kindle doesn't smell of anything. Of course, being human beings we are problem solving animals and we, as we have always done, have thought our way around the problem. We have covers for these e-readers. I have three, for reasons which parallel the Goldilocks tale. One came with the device, a cheap black leather case, and was functional but a little loose and it did not please me. The second, which I bought, was a purple latex sheath which attracted dust like a bugger and was therefore unpleasant to the touch. My final purchase, which so far has pleased me, is a brown hemp cover which is delightful to the touch, and also to the nose.

I am sometimes moving with the times, but I hope that it will be awhile yet until the smell of fantasy is eradicated.

*****

Gethin Down

Dafydd Evans

Luke Sampson

Adam Gilder