Scent of a Book

In addition to my TBR book pile, I have an equally massive TBR magazine stack. I subscribe to an, um, ambitious number of magazines, from Smithsonian to SELF to ZooBooks [yes, ZooBooks--who doesn't want pictures of baby animals in her mailbox every month?] and then I always buy a couple of glossies from the news stand, depending on who's on the cover. (I am surprisingly judgy about the covers.)
As with my TBR pile, I'm always a little behind in terms of which issue I'm currently reading in my TBR stack.
Which is why I'm drawing your attention to this kinda old tidbit from New York's Reasons to Love New York issue:
Because We're Home to Not Only the Publishing Industry But Also to a Woman Who Spends Her Days Smelling Books
You read it right--she's made it her job to catalog the smell of books.
"After artist Rachael Morrison, 29, started working at the MoMA library, she’d joke that she was 'smelling books' all day. She loves being surrounded by all these books in an increasingly digitized age—they already seem like artifacts. She began wondering what it would be like not to be able to smell them anymore. . . . Morrison wonders if, one day in the future, when all text is digital, 'will we think it’s strange or even gross that books once had a smell?'” 
So. Cool. 
I love how she's preserving the unique smell of books--the scent of a print book is one of my favorite things. Morrison's descriptions are fantastic: from "smoke, armpit" to "faint urine smell" to "hugging grandma, her wool winter coat, faint smokey smell." Maybe I'll start noting how the print books I'm reading smell, too.

This is Morrison's blog, in which you can see her catalog of book scents (which, of course, is in a print journal): Smelling the Books





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