What's That Smell--Bacon or a Book?

For the first time in months, I have a moment to breathe in the office. Granted, I have about ten things on my to-do list, but it's 4:15 on a Friday afternoon and I've been working my butt off all day. So, I'm giving myself ten minutes to surf the net.

And what did I happen on but something hilarious over at Richard Curtis's blog, E-Reads. I laughed-out-loud in my cubicle for about three minutes (that's very long in my world these days!).

Allow me to present you with one of Richard's oldies-but-goodies, "The Best of E-Reads: Aerosol Makes Your Nook Smell Like Crunchy Bacon":

From time to time we bring back some of the more popular articles and blogs posted on E-Reads. This one is from November 2009.
**********
A while back we wrote up a book lover who said she was reluctant to buy a Kindle “unless Amazon comes out with a special ‘book scented’ Kindle.” (See If They Can Make the Kindle Smell Like a Book, Maybe She’ll Buy One). It was all kind of a joke, but an enterprising manufacturer took it seriously enough to produce a line of aromatics simulating book scents. The aromas include New Book Smell and Classic Musty. The product is trademarked as Smell of Books™ and here’s how their website describes it:

Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?

Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?

If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.

But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.

Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book. Smell of Books™ is compatible with a wide range of e-reading devices and e-book formats and is 100% DRM-compatible.

Whether you read your e-books on a Kindle or an iPhone using Stanza, Smell of Books™ will bring back that real book smell you miss so much.

Among the five smells offered is “Crunchy Bacon”. This is a welcome novelty for noses jaded by such natural book fragrances as grass, leather, printer’s ink, and decaying paper. Hopefully, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France will invest heavily in shpritzing their collections with Crunchy Bacon. Some other but lesser known aromas associated with books are baked lamb shank, General Cho’s Chicken, and asparagus vinaigrette.

On a more scientific note, Henry Fountain of the New York Times reports on research to quantify old-book odors to help librarians preserve books more effectively. Fountain describes how conservators “analyzed the volatiles produced by 72 samples of old paper of different types and in varying condition from the 19th and 20th centuries, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that some compounds were reliable markers for paper with certain characteristics — high concentrations of lignin or rosin, for example, which make paper degrade relatively quickly.”

Read the full article HERE

While this post obvious takles the topic in a humorous and silly way, there's certainly something to what's being discussed. What book-lover doesn't get a rush from that somewhat-musty old-book smell?

A favorite pastime of mine (I say pastime because I haven't had any time in the present or even recent past to do this!) is wandering around rare book stores. Not only do I love to look at the brittle pages, the cover stains, etc. but the smell of a book carries with it so much history. Experiencing even a little piece of that history is thrilling to me, even if it is just in a scent.

I have a small, but lovely, collection of rare books myself and sometimes it makes me feel better after a bad day just to look at them, to think about their pasts--who touched them before me, who read them, if the book was a gift to its original owner, what part of the country it was read in, etc. etc.

One of my personal favorites is a Robert Frost greeting card (not the one at this link but for some nice history!)--it's one of merely a couple hundred copies printed by Joe Blumenthal, Frost's dear friend and printer. Normally, it wouldn't be all that exciting--it's just a greeting card. But this one was unique--inside the little card-book was a folded note from Blumenthal himself to the card's recipient, letting him know that Robert Frost dropped off his manuscript that day.

I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty damn cool.

And it smells too.

Not bad, just chock full of history.

Harry Potter Galore at Scotland Book Fest

It's very rare that I ever wish I lived in Scotland. And when I do, it's usually the result of some sexy man in a kilt from a historical romance novel. But right now, I'm kind of wishing I were able to just hop in my car (if I had a car, that is) and drive on over to the Wigtown Book Festival in southwest Scotland.

Why, you ask?

Because, for the first time ever, one of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter manuscripts is going on display, according to CBC News:

Handwritten manuscripts by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling are going on public display for the first time at a book festival in Scotland.

The original manuscripts, which are signed, were written as part of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets — the second title in the seven-book series that stormed the world and made Rowling a multimillionaire.

The framed pages contain "The Ballad of Nearly Headless Nick" and will be put on display at the ReadingLasses bookshop as part of the Wigtown Book Festival in southwest Scotland.

Nearly Headless Nick is the ghost who haunts Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The ballad was edited out of the book before publication.

"This is a one-off exhibition and contrary to belief it is not on a world tour," Gerrie Douglas-Scott of ReadingLasses, which focuses on books by women, told the Scotsman newspaper.

"We're very excited that this bit of Harry Potter is coming home to Scotland for 10 days."

The pages were first donated in 2005 by the author, who lives in Edinburgh, to the Scottish Language Dictionaries organization to help raise funds for a new Scottish language dictionary.

They subsequently ended up in the hands of Ilyas Khan, owner of the Asia Literary Review and a book collector. The Review is one of the festival's sponsors.

In 1999, the Scottish Parliament recognized the town as Scotland's National Book Town, marking the inaugural year of the festival, which runs from Sept. 24 to Oct.3.

See the complete post HERE

I'd kill to get an up close look at Rowling's manuscripts. I look at manuscripts every day, yes, but there's something so powerful about looking at an MS of one of the beloved titles on your bookshelf, years after you first read it. Or even just looking at an old manuscript will do it for me. Whenever libraries and museums put new manuscripts on display, I go weak in the knees. I'm not sure when I began having that reaction to manuscripts, but my love certainly escalated in college when I took a class called "Book Work."

Our main topic of study in the class was authorial versus editorial intent and, as such, we spent a great deal of time in the Boston University and Harvard University libraries and archives, getting a first-hand look at what the authors themselves had written in their notebooks. I love donning those white gloves, having each piece carried out to me, slipped out of its protective plastic sleeve so I could spend some time with the work.

Reminiscing over one particular project is even making me feel all jello-y inside. My big paper in that class was on Robert Frost's first collection of poetry, A Witness Tree, and the word/punctuation choices editors over time had made when reissuing the collection. So, given my thesis topic (I can't recall my thesis exactly at the moment haha), I would go to the archives and sit there for hours, transcribing Frost's handwritten poems into my notebook.

It was just love.