PRESERVING THAT SPECIAL LIBRARY SCENT

 
Instruments sample the air wafting through the library of St. Paul's Cathedral in London

Despite their potential to enrich our understanding of history and art, smells are rarely conserved with the same care as buildings or archaeological artifacts. But a small group of researchers, including Strlic and Leemans, is trying to change that — combining chemistry, ethnography, history and other disciplines to document and preserve olfactory heritage.

Some projects aim to safeguard a beloved smell before it disappears. When the library in London's St. Paul's Cathedral was scheduled for renovation, for example, Strlic and his UCL colleague Cecilia Bembibre set about documenting the historic library's distinct smell.

The team first analyzed the chemicals wafting from the collection, which includes books dating back to the 12th century, and the surrounding furnishings, which have barely changed since the library was completed in 1709. They used a process called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which helps separate, identify and quantify volatile organic compounds, to examine air samples they'd captured in the library.

"As an analytical chemist, I was able to characterize and quantify those molecules, but how people describe what they felt required a completely different approach," says Strlic. To whittle down the list of compounds identified by the mass spectrometer to the ones that humans can actually smell, the researchers next invited seven untrained "sniffers" into the cathedral library and asked them to describe its smell using a list of 21 adjectives commonly used to describe the compounds.

The list included words like green and fatty, which people frequently use to describe the smell of the chemical hexanal, and almond, which is associated with benzaldehyde. Both compounds are released by paper as it degrades. The sniffers were also invited to add any descriptors of their own.

One word that all sniffers used to describe the library wasn't particularly surprising: woody. Others that proved popular were smoky, earthy and vanilla. Such descriptors can help conservators assess the state of old paper, since papers that are slightly more acidic due to decay, for example, "smell more sweet," says Strlic. "And those that are stable smell more like hay."

Strlic and colleagues next matched the qualitative descriptors the sniffers had selected with their underlying chemical compounds to create a chemical "recipe" for the scent of the cathedral's library. Such recipes are published in scientific journals and stored in digital research repositories, so a chemist could theoretically whip up the smell of old books centuries from now, "even if, in the future, people no longer go to a library or no longer read physical books, and only receive all information digitally," says Strlic.

To read the complete article, see:
Recreating the smells of history (https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2026/recreating-the-smells-of-the-past)

Shenzhen Library Robotic Book Retrieval System

To watch the short video, see:
https://substack.com/@cpaxton/note/c-206202213?r=6bftv

   

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