Revisiting the Science Behind "Good Book Smell"

It's almost been a year since I discussed the rivalry between old-school books (not to be confused with old schoolbooks) and e-readers such as Kindle and Nook.* In the elapsed time I've read a lot of discussions of that topic on book blog sites and other social media. Interestingly, one of the most common reasons for the Old School faction to prefer "real" books is "the old book smell."  

Of course, the proponents for e-readers often say this is poppycock. I would submit to such skeptics this article by Mental Floss on the causes of "old book smell." 

E-reader marketers are selling aerosol fragrances to duplicate it, including but not limited to aromas with such names as: "New Book Smell," "Scent of Sensibility," and "Crunchy Bacon."
I've already made clear that I believe books have a distinctive and wonderful smell. Walk into an old bookshop and take a whiff. Yep, it smells like books. 

Before some e-reader fanatic comes along and says "Well maybe the smell is real, so what? It's not as important as being able to carry around 500 books in your purse," let me just remind everyone that smell is a very powerful sense. As this entry from "Psych Your Mind" talks about, smell is strangely connected to memory, in that you can smell something as a child and then one sniff of it as an adult can transport you back years to the events and emotions you felt at the time.  

For me, the smell of books brings back fond memories of digging through piles of old discarded library books with my mom and siblings every summer. Even a musty book (which, by the way, can be remedied with a Stinky Book Box**) or one infused with noxious cigar smoke brings back memories of when my dad brought home my first copies of the Sherlock Holmes stories (much as I disliked the tobacco smell, I just held my breath and pretended that Holmes himself had got all the books stinky with his constant smoking).


*Those discussions being buried under a year of blog entries, you can find them here and here.

**The instructions on how to make your own Stinky Book Box are outlined in The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New: A Simple Repair Manual for Book Lovers by Margot Rosenberg and Bern Marcowitz. Basically it involves a box and lots of those mini evergreen Christmas tree car hanger thingies (okay obviously I didn't know what they were called, so I had to look them up just now. Their proper name is Magic Trees Air Fresheners). There also are several alternative suggestions on this forum of LibraryThing. I need to eventually make one of these, and once I do maybe I'll have more authority to blog about them.