Why Not Get a Job as a Professional Book Smeller?

Whenever there is a public debate on why printed books will never disappear people always like to emphasize the importance of their smell and how this means that people will always prefer a printed book to its digital cousin/brother/sister/nephew/whatever you find appropriate.

I find it quite entertaining. Surely there must be more obvious and simpler reasons for why printed books will always have their place in people’s lives. Anyway, in my daily web-roamings I came across a project that’s quite out of the ordinary. Rachael Morrison is a Senior Library Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art Library (New York). She’s also an artist and one of her ventures is called “Smelling the Books”. This performance started in early 2010 and basically consists of Rachael going round and smelling every single book in the MoMA. So, let me get this right – not only do you work in a pretty cool place but on top of that you can just go round and smell books all day long. I mean come on, wouldn’t anyone love this as their day job? Where do I sign up?

There are 300,000 books in the MoMA collection so it might be quite a lengthy process…

And if you’d like to know what’s the science behind the smell of books, go over to the kind folks at AbeBooks. They’ve put together a neat little clip that might help you answer that question.