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The basement smelled like old paint and metal; glue, newsprint, vanilla, sea-kissed sweat. A sign propped up on a table upstairs had drawn me down there, looking for spoils: “Books, $1 Each.” I was in Cape Cod for the summer and 10. After some dignified begging, I was granted an advance on allowance. I selected 20 books.
It took me months to work through the haul, which included a battered-up Roald Dahl box set and an illustrated version of The Secret Garden. Each time I opened one, I was back in the basement, treasure hunting. I started to prefer old books to new, not just for the inscriptions to strangers, but for that smell. Old books turned stories into portals; until then, I hadn’t known reading could feel like time travel.
Science hasn’t cracked wormholes, but it has deconstructed the scents that make the experience of old books so appealing. Cecilia Bembibre, a lecturer at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, specializes in the preservation of historic smells and spends much of her time breaking down their particular compositions. In our digital era, old books meet her research qualifications; paper is at risk of becoming a limited-edition fragrance.
“We have found that there are some chemical compounds that keep coming up,” she explains. Like vanillin, which smells of vanilla; furfural, which is “like bread, almost cookie-like”; acid for undertones that linger, like vinegar; and hexenol, which evokes fresh-cut grass. There are compounds that smell like marzipan and others that reek of must and mold and threaten to ferment the ambrosial.
Bembibre samples the air in ancient libraries and cathedrals—not so far off from the sources of inspiration that have driven brands to attempt to distill that Cape Cod basement funk. In 2011, German publisher Steidl and Wallpaper partnered with Karl Lagerfeld and perfumer Geza Schoen to create the one-off scent Paper Passion. “I am a paper freak,” Lagerfeld declared at the time. It was reported that it took Schoen 17 tries to balance the cacophonic smells of the Steidl headquarters in Göttingen on which the fragrance was based. In 2017, Byredo produced a run of its Bibliothèque candle as a perfume, responding to rabid customer demand. It was so popular the scent was added to its permanent collection.
For its Replica line, Maison Margiela debuted the ASMR-inducing Whispers in the Library—an ode to low-lit libraries and wooden desks. Commodity Fragrances decided to sell scents for purists—not just the spare Book, but Paper too. Earlier this spring, Elorea introduced a line, Forgotten Words, based on poetic Korean phrases that have fallen out of fashion, while Diptyque unveiled L’Eau Papier—its own act of olfactive translation. The fragrance celebrates the moment that “ink soaks into a sheet of white paper” and includes white musks but also cereal notes and the roasted seed extract of sesame for depth. Acclaimed nose Fabrice Pellegrin set out to conjure the “sensations and emotions that a beautiful piece of white paper provides” when he developed the scent. “I thought about how to translate the texture of the paper, its velvetiness, its whiteness, and also its meeting with the ink,” he tells me. And therein, perhaps, lies another part of the appeal: A scent that evokes the written word holds the promise not just of stories told but those that are to come.
Bembibre’s job is to safeguard, not speculate, but it doesn’t surprise her that people are drawn to these fragrances. “Reading is a practice we value,” she tells me from her perch in one of the London libraries where she works. “Often, it evokes pleasant memories—all of that world captured in a little sniff.” She means that scent is emotional; not just a sequence of chemicals, but an expression of nostalgia and blinkered recollection. She has proven it. Not long ago, she conducted an experiment in which she visited the rare-books room at St. Paul’s Cathedral with a perfumer friend. Bembibre collected data, sampling the room’s chemical properties with scientific techniques, while the perfumer sniffed, constructing her own more subjective interpretation. The perfumes—which smelled not at all alike—were then bottled and sampled by a group of 30 people who were asked which was more effective at recalling the smell of old books. The results split down the middle—50-50. Bembibre has seen the candles and the perfumes; she used to chafe at their base notes. But the experiment changed her mind. “Perhaps it’s not the descriptors that we’re looking for, but the feeling.”
In the introduction to Alain Corbin’s masterful compendium of historical scents, The Foul and the Fragrant, the scholar Roy Porter laments that “history comes deodorized.” He frets that we’re losing our sense of the past as we lose touch with its smells—its funk and finesse, the putrid and the pleasurable. I’ve been back in dark libraries these past few months, researching a new project. In the quiet moments, I feel almost bathed in the resin and salt; moldering spines and wrinkled pages. Porter craves just a hint of the odor. So do I.
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