Readers have long loved the smell of books, especially old books, which seem to acquire particular scents of their own over time. Now Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlic, researchers at University College London’s Institute for Sustainable Heritage, have chemically analysed the smell of old books and devised what they call an ‘historic book odour wheel’. This odour wheel enables readers to match words subjectively used to describe the scent of an old book – words such as coffee, wood, earthy, vanilla, smoky, chocolatey – with the particular chemicals responsible for that smell.
The researchers explain all in a paper called ‘Smell of heritage: a framework for the identification, analysis and archival of historic odours’ which is available at: http://writ.rs/smellbook and includes the ‘odour wheel’ itself. Now if you find a book which smells of mothballs, for example, you can easily see that acetic acid is responsible.