In which Anna does not get Old Book Smell

[annathepiper]

I had a lovely little discussion about this on Facebook over the weekend, so I’m pulling this up into its own post.

Time and time again, in the eternal print vs. digital debate on books, one of the arguments I see the pro-print folks put forth is that ebooks can never replace the smell of an old book for them. People describe how it’s a vanilla-like smell, or in some cases brown-sugar-like. It’s a real and measurable phenonemon; it’s been studied! And intellectually, I certainly understand why people connect with it so strongly. It’s also a real and measurable phenomenon that people develop emotional attachments to smells, and certainly, I very much understand how a treasured book creates an emotional attachment.

But the smell thing? That doesn’t happen with me. Mostly, when I smell an old book, I have to fight off the urge to sneeze. Old books smell like dust to me, not like vanilla or brown sugar. Dara tells me it doesn’t happen with her, either. It makes me wonder if there’s a genetic thing going on here, like how cilantro tastes like battery acid to Dara.

Because as far as I can tell, my sense of smell isn’t particularly impaired. There are lots of smells I find pleasurable: tasty things baking, the smell of the ocean, wood crackling in a fireplace, the rosemary-and-lavender blend I like to use in my bubble bath. I do not, however, tend to form emotional attachments to smells. So I’m lacking one of the big factors I see cited on the print side of print vs. digital.

One of the folks in my Facebook discussion said she always thought of Giles in an early episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “I, Robot”:

Jenny Calendar: Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?

Giles: The smell.

Jenny Calendar: Computers don’t smell, Rupert.

Giles: I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a – it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It’s-it’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly.

Me, I always think of the Star Trek TOS series episode “Court Martial”:

Cogley: Books, young man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn’t so important, I’d show you something. My library. Thousands of books.

Captain James T. Kirk: And what would be the point?

Cogley: This is where the law is. Not in that homogenized, pasteurized synthesizer.

With powerful quotes like this in our pop culture references, honestly, I can’t blame my fellow book aficiandos for being so passionate about books as physical objects. Our culture does value them, and rightly so–though I could also argue that it doesn’t value them nearly as much as it should.

For me, though, the value and emotional attachment is not in the physical object, no matter how good it smells.

For me, Cogley and Giles are wrong. It’s the content of the books, their knowledge, their stories, that create the emotional attachment for me.

That is, indeed, the entire point of a book.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[feuervogel]

I'm with you. Old books smell musty. I don't get the vanilla thing at all.

Also, books take up space and are liable to start growing mold in certain climates. Ebooks take up no shelf space!

[mmegaera]

Cilantro tastes like dish soap, not battery acid [eg].

I'm with you on how old books smell dusty, though. When I was a librarian, one of my tasks was to weed through the donations. One of the first triage criteria I used was "how bad do these smell?" I can't tell you how many boxes of otherwise perfectly good books I threw into the recycling bin (not even the book sale) because they absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke or mold or stinks I couldn't even recognize.

Anyone who's got an emotional attachment to the smell of old books, I know how to break you of it, really, really fast.

That said, Powells makes my little heart go pittypat, but it's decidedly not because of the smell.

[annathepiper]

I have wondered perhaps if my personal collection is mostly not old enough to generate the smells people talk about. I've got books that date back to my college days but hardly anything older than that. I tend to swap out books I know I'll never read again, and replace them with new ones. A girl has only so much shelf space, after all!

[feuervogel]

I decided to test this hypothesis: I went to my bookshelves and sniffed the oldest books I have. One is a 1963 German-English dictionary for chemists. It just smelled a little old and dusty. The Roget's Thesaurus of unknown age (1950s edition, probably not that old) smelled musty. The 1911 collected works of Goethe in English (a gift, I think, and the cover on the spine is half gone, so it's not terribly valuable I'm sure) almost has that vanilla smell people mention. It's still a bit musty, but there's a hint of sweetness to it.

[annathepiper]

Ooh, well done there. :D

I don't think I have anything old enough in my personal library. The oldest surviving thing I own I think may be my papercopy copy of The Hobbit, which dates back to sixth grade.

Dara just showed me a book she has that dates back to 1918 and that isn't showing any sign of the smell. We're checking other old books in the house too but so far not coming up with anything that smells anything other than 'musty'.

[annathepiper]

*lol* Dara gets 'battery acid', usually. Less often she gets 'dish soap'.

As I've been noting on other comments on this whole discussion though it has occurred to me to wonder whether none of the books in my collection are actually old enough to generate the famous old book smell that so many people talk about. We poked around through books in the house last night and one of the oldest ones we could find was a 1918 edition. Didn't have the smell.

The oldest thing I personally have in my collection that I can easily find is my paperback of The Hobbit, which was a late 70's release. No noticeable smell aside from very slight mustiness. But there could be environmental factors at work here too since this IS the Pacific Northwest--I dunno!

[mmegaera]

Yes, but how many people actually regularly read books old enough to have that smell?

It's kind of like saying, I only want to sit on wooden furniture because that antique chair I once sat on smelled so good.