Why do old books smell so good? | Hacker News Reader

Why do old books smell so good?

scienceswitch.com

318 pointsconse_lad222 comments

This article immediately brought to mind a particular conversation in season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

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

Giles: "The smell."

Jenny: "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."

Computers can be smelly, too. Ever booted up your old Windows 95 box from the basement? The dust blown from the fans has a particular smell. It is even more dramatic for real vintage computing like punch card machines, which smell very oily, in a similar way like very old cars and planes.

Indeed so. Once in my youth I brought my Amiga 500 to a friend's place, and he had a cat that peed on the edge of it.

The computer was ok, but it was basically a flood of cat pee seeping in into the memory expansion slot underneath.

Tried everything to get rid of the smell. Including perfume. Didn't make it better. Especially when it got hot.

Still today, when I smell cat urine I instantly think of Motorola 68000 assembly.

> Still today, when I smell cat urine I instantly think of Motorola 68000 assembly.

I did not expect to read that today. Or ever.

When a friend incorrectly wired up an AT power supply, causing the power cord to explode on power up, that made a distinctive smell.

Relevant:

Ooops, I forgot to put the paste on the processor

My personal snafu was plugging a 9 pin CGA cable into 9 pin serial port. White smoke started billowing out of the power supply. Turned it off, fixed the provision, and the computer still worked after that.

I love the smell of doing a good wipe on my hardware by sticking all of it in the microwave.

The smell of burnt silicon in the morning is what keeps me waking up everyday.

Computers can be smelly, too

Yep. The specific smell of the VOCs burning off a new Commodore 64 or 1541 brings back a flood of memories of cold, dark Winter evenings standing in the driveway waiting for the UPS guy.

I feel like this could be rendered as a 16 bit screen saver.

Disassembling and building computers as a teen, the smell of a freshly booted motherboard was almost intoxicating. The clicking and buzzing of the floppy drive. Crackling of the screen. Warm hum of the fan. It all transported me to another world where anything was possible.

The complaint is more websites don’t have a distinct smell.

Walk through a library and a dozen different books can all have distinct smells. Perhaps this book was taken to the beach a few times while that that one used a slightly unusual glue. Based on book age and the publisher involved you can even encounter similar smells looking at different copies of the same book at different libraries.

So yes a computer has a distinct smell the way a library does but that smell doesn’t change based on the knowledge you’re browsing.

Maybe we all need DIY home fragrance printers: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-create-a-home-fragrance...

HN posts could deliver your favorite fragrance for high points articles or deliver something undesirable for articles, say, about Rust (I kid, I kid).

I am from eastern europe, my dad was vice principal in high school. I would pay good money today to smell again that dusty computer lab room filled with good'ol 386 and mario sounds.

> Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young

How come I'm never able to identify where it's coming from?

I'd make a candle out of it if I ever found it

Try to sell it, never sell out of it, I'd probably only sell one

It'd be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose

Same clothes, homegrown, a stone's throw from a creek we used to roam

But it would remind us of when nothing really mattered

Out of student loans and tree house homes, we all would take the latter

There's some kid today who will experience future nostalgia from opening an Alibaba package.

How about the smell of a dying C64 power supply? Anyone else?

As well as teen spirit and napalm

It reminded me of a similar sentiment by Marcel Proust:

“So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.”

We call it "Madeleine de Proust" in French.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_de_Proust

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_memory

"Proust Effect" or something like that in English.

I think I've seen "Madeleine Moment" most often in English.

Funny i know about Proust from The Sopranos.

If we're sharing I learned about him from the preeminent Proust scholar in the United States, while I watched Little Miss Sunshine.

Same

When i'm sawing wood and the dust starts smelling burnt, I'm immediately transported back into my late dad's workshop. Easily happens when the teeth are wearing out. Also, somehow the fumes of his sigars smelled very similar.

Then there’s the scene in the beginning of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad Love Story where the protagonist is reading a book on an airplane and the young woman next to him complains about the smell.

The first computer shop that I went to as a kid (back when computer shops were a thing) had a very distinct smell that still evokes very strong memories for me now. I guess it probably wasn’t the computers themselves, but maybe that foamed rubber material used for mousepads and such, plus maybe some static charge in the air from CRTs or something? Any time I catch that smell, I’m immediately back playing Loom and Monkey Island and oogling at Pentiums and 1 GB hard drives.

Dust burning in those monitors perhaps?

Are things just not as fascinating now? Is there anything similarly cutting edge today. I know that part of it I was much younger but I also remember most of the people around were way older and seemed to share in the wonder and amazement at those GB+ hard drives and the thought of 32mb of ram.

I guess there's just not anything new that's advancing so rapidly.?.? Like my computer is 13 years old and is still overpowered for 99% of tasks. And they are still selling brand new computers with far lower specs. Imagine in 1997 being satisfied as a developer with a computer from 1984!

I also have other interests and it feels like they have plateaued similarly. I guess I'm still getting some dopamine from solar and battery tech, price drops at least, and some neatness around microcontrollers and IOT but like even food has stopped seeming innovate. It used to be worthy of a day trip to drive into the city to eat at new exotic offerings and now every small town has mostly the same stuff and there's nothing really new in the city either.

You missed out on 3d printers in the last 2 decades apparently. Those have gone leaps and bounds from very rickety prototypes like the og MakerBot to cheap workhorses. Stepper motors used to cost like $75 ea and are now like 4 for $15.

Smart phones as well.

Many of these things you don't notice till they're everywhere.

If I spent more time I could list many other things I think but I don't know your filter

Please list more things if you have some time

Electric bikes and scooters

The last two decades seemed to have progressed glacially slow.

We've had smartphones for fifteen years and they haven't really improved much. Better camera, a few more sensors, more durable glass. Incremental improvements. About the same for laptops and desktops.

3D printing has come a fair way, but we're still not printing cars at home. (I totally would download a car.)

Now all of a sudden we have AI/ML, self-driving cars, high fidelity consumer mocap, AR/VR. The types of things coming out now seem way more sci-fi, cutting edge, and optimistic. A return to the imagination and dreams of the 1950's - 1990's.

2000 - 2020 was a speed bump.

From 2000 to 2010 we progressed from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.

The point is more - today's smartphones are the first iphone with a better camera and faster data connection.

That said in other areas there's much more improvement, for example EVs, solar panels, intelligent search engines. Remember the days when we used scripts that would parallelize searches over lycos, yahoo, webcrawler, altavista, alltheweb, ...

The counter point is that the innovation never stopped, it just moved down a level. We 'optimized' the hardware (as in gave it sufficient form to fulfill necessary functions) then did the same for the application space. Twitter, Facebook, Google, music streaming, all solidifying their phone presence over the past ten years.

Just as the application space has begun to stagnant, suddenly our data is speaking back to us through LLMs. Such models will be the next space we'll 'optimize', but these models will also be optimizing themselves. Strange loop.

> Twitter, Facebook, Google, music streaming, all solidifying their phone presence over the past ten years.

I would argue these are all worse outcomes than I'd hoped for.

I dreamed we'd have utilities based on RDF and bittorrent that could pull down any data we liked. Track any authors across the internet, highlight all content about topics we liked, pull in all new astronomy photos. Automatic ranking and scoring to fit our preferences. Better collaboration, much higher signal, much less noise.

I thought we'd control the data, the pipes, the routing, all of it.

We have a product manager internet, not a magical utility knife internet.

In 2001 you could get the Kyocera Palm phone, which is a more valid comparison. But yes.

Nokia also released 9210 about the same time as 3310. From that perspective iPhone was even less of an improvement and a step back in some aspects.

I totally would download a car.

Underrated reference. Well done.

> We've had smartphones for fifteen years and they haven't really improved much. Better camera, a few more sensors, more durable glass. Incremental improvements. About the same for laptops and desktops.

For the past few years they've been experimenting with foldable screens, with hints of rollable screens maybe coming soon, so that's something at least.

I feel like you must be intentionally exaggerating for a reason.

Between the processing power, battery life, storage space (100x), ram (50x), screen resolution (20x pixels) and refresh rate, not to mention network speed…

I can record 4K video at 60fps. On my phone. How is that an incremental improvement?

I consume a huge amount of the web on my phone (and not hate myself or constantly zoom in and out), can type meaningfully fast with swipe/trace, copy/paste to/from my laptop, can use my phone as a webcam (realtime), useful realtime navigation, I pay for the majority of my purchases by holding my phone to a sensor, I put completely wireless incredibly light earbuds that last hours in my ears for listening and talking that actively cancel noise.

Today's phones are incredible.

On the other end of the spectrum, the cheapest smartphones can be purchased for less than $10.

Most of what you've listed is "take this number, make it larger", same as the past century. Foldable and rollable screens are actually something new.

Have the 3D printers that are affordable and available enough for regular people advanced in their material capabilities much? The inability to print high strength materials like high impact polycarbonate or metal was what made early 3D printers mostly a novelty for me. I didn't think that had changed; however, I could very well be wrong.

What you're experiencing is largely that now everything is nearly instantly discoverable. In the 1980s and 90s, you would find out about new technology or product at a computer store. You might read an article in a computer magazine about a technology, but for a product, you're as likely to learn about it from a knowledgeable clerk. And clerks had to be knowledgeable because they were that initial discovery mechanism.

Now, you find out about a new technology or product instantly, and you learn about them constantly. It is rare that a company develops something new enough that it's significantly differentiated from something you already know about (or even have) that it's exciting.

Even Apple had a lot of leaks before Vision Pro (which is potentially the most exciting new technology product, at least for me, in years). They had to balance when to announce it with the leaks - to maximize the impact while ensuring you didn't have to wait too long to get one.

I think you're missing the point. Even the Vision Pro is just incrementally better than Hololens almost a decade later.

> the Vision Pro is just incrementally better than Hololens

Hololens had 1268x720 per eye[1] or 1.8MP across both eyes. Vision Pro is 23MP across both eyes. Are you seriously saying that's "incrementally better"? It's a literal order of magnitude more pixels!

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/419869/we-found-7-critical-h...

If that order of magnitude more pixels doesn't enable people to do more, make the old and impractical the new and practical, or even leave people with the desire to upgrade, I would argue that order of magnitude more pixels could be incrementally better.

Then again, sometimes incremental ends up sneaking up on us and being revolutionary in the end. There are many technologies that appeared in the 80s (if not earlier), yet did not turn out to be practical until several decades of incremental development happened.

I’ve personally used a HoloLens, and I would consider it not useful outside of very specific edge cases. The viewport is extremely small (as in, most of your vision is not the hologram despite it still restricting your vision considerably), it’s hazy, low res, not very bright, and objects were not perfectly stable. It still was exciting as crap to use one, but a HoloLens vs the hardware of the vision pro is about on par with an original PlayStation vs a PS5. It’s more than a generational leap. I haven’t seen a vision pro in person, but I’ve seen a Vive, and that’s already leaps and bounds above a HoloLens in quality. The HoloLens works differently than the vision pro, which is really an extremely sophisticated VR headset, so they’re not even the same product category really. A HoloLens is more similar to a Google Glass.

That said, AR goes back decades with the early implementations being as primitive (if not more primative) relative to the HoloLens as the HoloLens is to the Vision Pro. While every new step may see the technology become more desirable and it may even garner higher adoption rates, it has no impact upon the lives of most people. Heck, as far as I can tell, it has no indirect impact upon the lives of most people. While the specifications may grow in leaps and bounds, I wouldn't really call it a technological leap until it has a greater impact.

(That said, the Vision Pro is a bit young to tell how much of an impact it will have.)

It's still 'vertically scaling' the number of pixels of hololens like devices. That might have needed innovations in manufacturing, but the product itself is not much of an innovation in my book.

That's honestly very similar to saying "4K Blu-rays are just incrementally better than VHS", by ignoring most of the differences and just considering that they're both media for video.

And yet, you're doing exactly the same thing with both. The experience is better, and there's some novelty with extra features you can interact with (though aside from subtitles, I don't think I've ever used them myself).

In terms of what they do for the user the difference is, in fact, incremental compared to when VHS first became available. VHS enabled you to choose what to watch whenever you wanted. Prior to that, you got whatever was on whatever channels you had access to.

I will definitely grant that enabling subtitles was a profound difference for a subset of viewers (those who enjoy foreign media and the deaf) but even that came about with DVDs, not Blu-ray.

> enabling subtitles was a profound difference for a subset of viewers (those who enjoy foreign media and the deaf) but even that came about with DVDs, not Blu-ray.

Closed captions were available on many, but not all, VHS tapes. Not all DVDs had subtitles either. The problem with CC on VHS was that it was often the first thing to degrade before the picture and then the sound.

Foreign films often had subtitled releases "baked in" to the video. Here's another hit of nostalgia. There were times you'd walk into a Blockbuster in the USA and the only available version of a hot new Hollywood release was the Spanish or French subtitled version. You had to deal with the lost sections of image dedicated to subtitles in a language you might not even understand!

It feels like the consumer base is much less diverse than it used to be. Tech used to look like a cornucopia of different shapes, colors, features. Now it's all the same. Twenty years ago the "gaming phone" was an Ngage and the "fashion phone" could pass for a tube of lipstick. In 2023 the "gaming phone" has an extra pair of invisible touch sensors and the "fashion phone" comes in pink.

The smell of a newly opened rewriteable CD

Wow, I can still evoke the memory and scent of that first spindle of blank CDs I bought for my 1x CD writer. It's so distinct and unforgettable.

the short answer is pretty much all tech we use was invented in the 1970's and is just being iterated on at this point. There really is not much new coming out and all the really cool stuff has turned out to be too difficult to be reliable or require too much power to ever get beyond toy status.

It was more than the rate of progress, though the rate of progress certainly helped. For a lot of people the computers of the 70's, 80's, and 90's captured their imagination because of how it could change the world. The same could be said of prior technological revolutions.

Even though we see a lot of technological progress these days, we are mostly out of the revolution phase. The computer is a part of our lives, much like electricity, the automobile, and the airplane. Those who love gadgets will be excited about each new step, yet it is nowhere near as exciting to everyone else. That is not to say that we are out of the revolution phase. People were genuinely excited about developments in mobile phones until a few years ago. This current hubbub over AI may stimulate people imaginations if it doesn't end up stalling again.

I chuckled at your comment about a 1997 developer being satisfied with 1984 technology. It seems like some 2023 developers are excited about 1984 technology. In many cases, it is because the tooling for things like build your own computers at the component level has become more accessible (rather than being an exercise in pure nostalgia).

I don't know what you smelled. But this conjured up the image of an old blue mousepad I used as a kid (and the smell!). Well done.

I know it was just a quote in a show but I can call to mind the electricy smell that old computer labs had and it puts me at peace

Apple trackpads have a certain smell and I don't exactly know how to describe it, but it's similar to Scotch tape. I really like that smell. More things should smell good like that.

There was an attempt to standardise scented content back in the '80s, but it didn't stick. The root cause of market failure was consumers deterred by a format war between the compressed odour format, Nosepeg, and the higher fidelity (but patent-encumbered) WIF

But the real failure was the always-bad-smelling PNGent. Not sure why they thought that would have worked at all.

Bitmac-and-cheese smelled delicious.

I have some Radio Shack solder that I bought in the mid 1970s. It smells /wonderful/ and takes me back to building kits when I was a teen.

It it’s that old, it probably has lots of lead in it, and you probably shouldn’t use it.

Eh, leaded solder is just fine with some basic precautions (and still indicated for military and space ratings) but the smell is probably a highly reactive core flux (rosin) that will eat away at anything it's used on and needs to be vigorously cleaned off after soldering. It may also be a sensitizing allergen so maybe kabdib shouldn't use it, at least not without an extractor.

If you're doing more than the once a year small project you should have fume extraction, occupational (or hobby-based) asthma sucks. As does metal flu (zinc for welding and tin for soldering although I expect that's rarer).

My brand new economics textbook in college smelled like vomit. I since noticed other new textbooks now and then with the same smell.

Do you think it might be psychosomatic? The quality of many textbooks' content would be sufficient to evoke the odour of vomit, I tender...

I expected a comment comparing the smell to the content, but it really did smell like vomit, from the moment I opened it. I kept my other textbooks, but sold that one as soon as the semester ended. Didn't need it stinking up my bookshelf!

I'm sure it was the VOC's in the glue.

Oxford UP textbooks always smelled like this, Atkins in particular

I know; sorry, I couldn't resist :D

In all seriousness though, there is a lot about textbook publishing that is inexplicably different from other non-fiction books. For instance:

- Why not use the conventional paperback size if the textbook is not reliant on large diagrams? Why do textbooks always have to be massive?

- Why are there so many 'infoboxes' and 'did you knows' and 'warnings' (a characteristic that textbooks share with do-it-yourself and self-help books)?

- Why do almost all textbooks start with lengthy 'How to Use This Book' chapters? If you're in a course, you should have already been told, and most of those seem pretty common-sense anyway.

My favourite business textbooks that mostly avoid these disadvantages (as I see them):

- Managing without Profit, Mike Hudson: an almost complete guide to the mechanics of non-profit organisations; perfect if you already have a good grasp of for-profit business fundamentals.

- A Manager's Guide to Self-Development, Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne and Tom Boydell: mostly tests in the same vein as Myers-Briggs, explaining various aspects of personality, behaviour and strategy.

- Interpersonal Skills at Work, Maureen Guirdham (not the John Hayes book of the same name!): very academic look at the social dynamics of workplaces, with proper citations to actual studies for further reading; very thought-provoking and genuinely useful if applied carefully.

> For instance:

Those weren't in any of my Caltech textbooks.

You clearly had good textbooks - or is more that your textbooks were American? All the textbooks I have had owned have been British ones, and since curriculums usually differ across countries or even institutions maybe there is no overlap between the publishers operating in the USA and UK?

Butyric acid is a highly unappealing compound characteristic of vomit. Cellulose acetate butyrate is used in inks and coatings and can decompose to butyric acid. Maybe how it happened

The explanation I was looking for!

huh, TIL. I've also had books that smelled like vomit, though I forgot about that altogether until this comment chain. Thanks!

The smell of new plastic of new components used to be exciting, now it smells different, typically like nothing.

There is new-Mac smell though…

Does each book smell different, evoking associated memories; or do they have the same smell, evoking a non-specific feeling?

I remember advertisements for iSmell:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismell

I guess it never caught on (maybe the name :/). Following the first link it sounds like there are a few more that have tried something similar.

you can replace smell with audio/music and other sensations. or one could manually add specific smells when studying certain topics. books are great, but they can't fill many usecases computers can

The smell of my first IBM ThinkPad was quite strong. Today that smell triggers good memories of playing old video games or building my first website. I still keep that laptop only to occasionally smell it.

Jordi Roca, pastry chef from 3 Michelin star restaurant El Celler de Can Roca, designed a dessert based on the scent of old books.

He captures that characteristic smell using a technique called enfleurage, soaking an old book in a neutral fat and then distilling it using a device called Rotaval.

He then pours some drops on thin wafers that resemble book pages.

Here is a short video describing the process: https://youtube.com/shorts/zN2uHgX0rRA

Not particularly appealing for someone dealing with the [Marikio Aoki phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariko_Aoki_phenomenon).

Walking into a library and smelling old books triggers the urge to defecate for me.

This is an incredible wtf article. It’s so absurd it has to be real, I don’t know how it could be made up.

One data point, I’ve been affected by this for decades now. I had no idea before the article that others experienced it too.

Well that's interesting, i was in a paper shop this afternoon (i love paper shops), and i suddenly wanted to go to the bathroom and realized it happens often there!

Wow, that's wild. Certain rooms do that to me. In the house where I grew up it was the upstairs room. (It wasn't the stairs themselves; no other stairs in the house did it) In our current home it's the basement. Sadly those rooms are not filled with books.

I can't tell if it's a statistically real effect. I had always told myself it was not real, but having heard of "Marikio Aoki" phenomenon for the first time just now, I'm wondering...

I have a workshop that I credit with the same effect. Every trip to the workshop is at least two trips, because I'm interrupted.

Also I associate this with gambling, no matter the stakes or the location, including locations that don't trigger any response in different contexts (like my living room).

Glad to know I'm not completely alone....

OMG. I have crohn's disease and walking into a library gives me the urge to go, consistently.

Ditto. Libraries and bookstores can be an issue.

Is he...OK? There's eccentric and then there's needing help

Apart from suffering from dysphonia and as far as I know yes, he is OK. He was awarded World's Best Pastry Chef in 2014 and his restaurant has been awarded either best or second best restaurant in the world by Restaurant Magazine (50 Best) 5 years in a row. Not sure if he needs much help, to be honest.

I wouldn't care if he won a Nobel Prize - dirty old books sound like a disgusting ingredient to use.

You really don't want to learn what you have actually ingested over the years.

Following your logic, you’ve probably accidentally ingested some faeces at some point in your life. Therefore I invite you over to my house for a 3 course meal of whatever I find at the local dog park

I'm laughing pretty hard here, that analogy makes no sense whatsoever and doesn't follow my logic at all.

Perhaps if the chef in question was serving an entire book as a meal sprinkled with some feces :)

:)! I laughed at your pathetic, reaching original reply too! :D

Did you though? Or did you get all emotional and tell me to eat shit ;)

There was movie about that process (though not with books): "Perfume, the Story of a Murderer"

I liked it.

It's also a very engaging book

Nowadays I would be curious, and rather worried, about known carcinogens in those old books. I remember buying in the 1990s a fantasy trade paperback from Tor Books that had an enchanting floral scent, such that I frequently stuck my nose into the book while reading. I don’t know if the publisher and author had deliberately used certain paper or treated it with a certain scent, or this was just a nice coincidence. But now I wonder if I was just giving myself cancer from some chemical that was considered innocuous at the time.

Everything is basically giving you cancer according to California.

Especially Californians.

"There's no cure, there's no answer, everything gives you cancer!" One of the great Joe Jackson tunes.

Life causes cancer. Which causes death. Not living life also causes death. In short, don’t fret about it. Enjoy it while you have it.

"Not living life also causes death."

Well, if you sit around all day and don't move much, sure. You will shorten your lifespan by a lot.

Or you'll live long, boring life anyways since you have good genes. Nothing in life is certain.

There are two certain things in life: Death and taxes.

And I can enjoy life for longer if I don't live in a house with lead paint or e̶a̶t̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶a̶p̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ forget my teflon pan on the stove.

I dislike platitudes like these that don't acknowledge that life is about tradeoffs, and sometimes a little caution gives large rewards.

Or deal with flaking paint in an old house--which inevitably does have lead paint that has been painted over.

Yes but treating everything like possible lead paint is a sure way to live a miserable life. We need to be careful if there is proof of harm, not assume that everything is harmful.

That's a perfectly fine message, but the original post had none of the necessary subtlety. If your life advice could be used in a cigarette ad, you've diluted it too far.

Immediately what I thought of was smoking cigarettes. Enjoy life but educate yourself about what can extend it and reduce it. Indulge (or not) with open eyes.

Are you enjoying life?

No joke, I'm writing this comment from a sunbed at the beach, watching the crystal clear water with loved ones around and a dog nestled at my feet.

Yes, I'm enjoying life, thanks for asking :)

> eat scraps of Teflon from my pan

I’m sure there’s a doctor or a chemist in here who can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve always understood Teflon to be super-duper-ultra inert. They literally make arterial grafts out of Teflon.

I think it is the glue or chemicals used to bind teflon is the issue.

> Birds are susceptible to a respiratory condition called "teflon toxicity" or "PTFE poisoning/toxicosis." Deaths can result from this condition, which is due to the noxious fumes emitted from overheated cookware coated with polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE).

Sure, but burning Teflon and inhaling the fumes is much different from eating pieces of Teflon that flake off in your pan. Plenty of otherwise-harmless things are suddenly not harmless when you burn and inhale them.

Doctor-chemist here. You are correct. The carbon-fluorine bond is very inert to metabolism. Ingested Teflon would be almost entirely eliminated unchanged.

Takes pretty harsh conditions to break Teflon, but interestingly it can react with explosive violence, as I have witnessed, when combined with small particle sized Mg.

Why all the recent fuss about ingesting PFAS and “forever chemicals” then? I thought Teflon is a kind of PFAS?

PFAS afaik are used in the process of making teflon pans, namely in getting the teflon to stay attached to the pan's metal itself.

Heavy metals and other toxins bind to inert materials and enter/stay in the body when introduced by PFAS and microplastics

I think it is but I believe the rub is related to cooking temp. You're not supposed to heat it above x (400F? not sure) and it breaks down beyond that.

Sure, but you should also probably avoid asbestos.

Don't you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone!

A friend of mine used to tell a story of when he was young, and asked an elderly relative at a family do how old he was, "67" he replied; "I wouldn't want to live to 67!", "You would if you were 66".

Those lead paint chips aren't going to eat themselves, live a little!

I think I will not lie on my death bed regretting not having lived in a lead painted house, not having smoked or having showed some common sense. Also I think I will not be alone because of it.

I've had a few close family members pass from cancer. I was a caretaker during these times for them. Talking with them, changing them (people are really heavy!), feeding them, medicating them, bathing them, etc. We had very good hospice support and paid a lot for it, but during the pandemic, everything kinda went to shit, so it was up to me and a few others most of that time.

Dying of cancer is unique to every person and their cancer's progression. But, from my own experiences, dying of cancer is a fucking horrible way to go.

The pain is quite bad as it colonizes various nerve bundles and organs. Morphine only does so much and wanes as the person gets addicted to it and requires more and more to get the numbing results. As such, your mind goes with the morphine intake, a welcome relief really. You can lose function in your limbs and bowels too, though not always. You stop eating and drinking, but you don't stop thirst and hunger. Death really does become a welcome relief after enough weeks/months of this. Then there is the just normal health hazards and pains of laying down and generating filth. The rashes and sores, the muscle loss, the boredom. It's quite horrible. And that's with loving family members helping you at a moment's notice. One pro-tip here, if you can get a death doula.

Look, I get the sentiment here. Yes, live your life, don't worry so much about how it's going to end. There's likely nothing you could have done different anyway. Your end is going to really suck, no matter what. Better to have it be quick and as painless as possible.

But, I do want to advocate for taking common sense measures about carcinogen avoidance. Those are absolutely worth the time and effort. Do not smoke, don't have lead paint in your house, don't be stupid or lazy about getting these things away from you. Your future self will be very thankful you did that. I know, I've helped dying people who didn't.

I've been reading So Much For That, by Lionel Shriver, and the description of a slow decline due to mesothelioma has much in common with your experiences. I've learned more in the last week about what it might be like to have some of the many forms of cancer than I ever knew before.

Yes but some forms of death are a good deal worse than others. Many cancers in particular can be an awful way to go, especially when it's happening with your full knowledge of its inevitability and lack of ability to do anything about it. I'm not going to give up something I enjoy (or even the indirect benefits of using a particular substance) just to live a few extra years, but if doing so significantly reduces the chances of a drawn-out painful death, then there's surely an alternative worth looking for.

Be especially cautious around emerald green books. There's a possibility they contain arsenic

http://wiki.winterthur.org/wiki/Poison_Book_Project

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/these-gre...

And this gem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624037

Good point. In general pay attention to old stuff. Pathogens can be chemical or organic.

And indirectly, there seems to be agent spread on books you get from amazon too. I have an old 80s english CS book that smells too bad, so much i get a light headache. (not too far from what you get from some made in china plastics). It may be anti-fugal treatment.

There’s another book smell which I noticed in lots of kids books when I was a kid, that totally smelled like vomit. For years I thought it was because kids barfed all the time but it turns out it was the printing chemicals and paper.

Oh wow I forgot about that specific smell for 30 years and suddenly I can smell it again.

I wonder if that's to prevent kids from eating the paper. Similar to Nintendo's cartridges having a bad flavor.

Parm also contains butyric acid.

What's parm?

Parmesan cheese

Who calls Parmesan cheese "parm"? Is that a US thing?

Yes

On the east coast you'll also hear "pruhjhoot", "Muhtz" and "Sopresat" (prosciutto, mozzarella, soppressata).

It's a common additive in baked goods as well! I used to work at a bakery that would pump it through the HVAC to attract customers. People loved it, but all I could smell was vomit after being around it for so long. I rarely eat pastries anymore.

I remember exactly the same thing as a kid in certain books. I acutely remember the feel/texture of the paper of those vomit smell books too. So funny.

I remember a magic school bus book with this exact smell.

I once blogged about the lack of word for this smell[0], and came across someone else that has asked this[1] too. Just like 'petrichor' for the smell of fresh earth following rain.

I made up my own word for this, in Norwegian: 'Gammelbokduft'.

[0] https://earth.hoyd.net/lukten-av-gamle-boker-118/ [1] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57416/word-for-th...

Does that just translate to rotting book smell?

I would say it translates to old book smell

Yes, that would be it. The word "gammel" means most of the times old, but I can see where it would be used as something rotten too.

In Scandinavian languages, gammel or a similarly-spelled cognate means "old". I dont know about rare cases where it might mean "rotten", I dont speak any of them well enough. But in German, "gammeln"/"vergammelt" doesnt mean old. It means to rot/rotten.

Not Norwegian but sounds like it to me, a German. In any case in German this is exactly how you'd create a new word. Gammeln (rotting) + Buch (book) + Duft (scent). Then you have Gammelbuchduft.

In French maybe you can make it parfum de livre.

Yep also German that's why I had the thought :D

Why really really old books smell so bad:

In the scribe days in England when literacy was exclusive and the texts and manuscripts were intricate and long-term artistic endeavors…

…the most frequent sealant used was sheep urine. IIRC. Basically there’s a LOT of reasons to wear gloves and a mask in the kind of places where they are stored for longevity.

Source: Early-Middle English course taught by an Oxford Man.

AFAIK, this claim of requiring gloves when handling old and rare books is an outdated misconception [0] [1].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/arts/rare-books-white-glo...

[1] https://ask.loc.gov/preservation/faq/337286

I’m not saying anything is mandatory and tradition in the English scholarship field is…curious.

Source: inducted to Sigma Tau Delta last semester I think to cover their ass if I do something great eventually. The only STD i knowingly have.

Every now and then you realize people have vastly different base experiences. The smell of old books makes me crinkle my nose and take shallower breaths. I don't like it. Old dust is what I think of. Stale. My physical reaction has always made me assume it is bad for your health. Maybe hints of mold?

I think there is something to this, as another comment mentioned the "soap/cilantro gene". I love the smell of old books, as described in TFA, but I know a guy who hates it. He describes it as you do, as the smell of dust. His taste in food is also quite different from mine, as in we actually seem to detect different things when eating the same food.

That smell makes me want to crap, and I'm not the only one: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/general-science/unbearable...

This is fascinating. I always experienced this uh, urge. Glad to know I’m not a unique weirdo.

For me, old books in particular ... a bit of an issue as a researcher often needing to go into the deep stacks of the University library. I always had to, err, prepare myself, beforehand.

Wow I never knew this was a thing... thank you for sharing, I think :-)

“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go”. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. After reading this as a kid, I always found this to be true. In particular, the public library pulp paperbacks on those rotating wire racks back in the 1980s.

My father worked in a paper mill and told me about the incredible fact that artificial vanilla was a byproduct of the forest industry!

https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/vanilla_is_a_forest_industry_b...

https://zanos.co.uk/news/sustainable-vanillin-from-the-fores...

I never understood this. They smell like old attics. Or old closets. Or, old people. None of which smell very good. I must have that soap/cliantro gene but for books.

The question of "what is old book smell?" is well answered. I was hoping to get some musings about why. That is, what is it about us that makes us associate those chemicals as positive?

I think there can be coincidence. Some things just have a smell because like chemistry and such. The brain must represent that particular chemical signal somehow. But when it's a noteworthy smell, when it's the kind of thing people write articles about, I expect a little more.

Truffles smell good to animals because if they didn't, animals wouldn't dig them up and help distribute the spores. Decaying meat smells bad to animals because if it didn't, we might eat it and get sick (that battle having been already lost to the decomposers).

So with that in mind, why do old books smell so good?

Because they want to be read.

I don’t know, I think it’s not so much the smell but how distinctive it is, that mixed with knowing what it is (compared to something macabre) reinforces nostalgia. I think it also helps that many books are timeless

Publishers wouldn't choose papers and ink that smelled bad. There's a lot of ways to make paper and ink, so it's not that surprising that we'd eventually nail the aesthetics.

Fisher library in Sydney Uni. Millions of volumes in open stacks over 9 (i think) floors. "Buzzing with knowledge and light" as someone said back on campus many years ago. Very cool place to just go hang out. It was where I first discovered some old worn copies of Murakami "Hear the Wind Sing" and "Pinball 1973" in English. Only place I've ever seen them in fact.

I wonder if there is something to that association, mentally

I’ve been more into digital books my whole life, but before the last 10 years or so, my preference was seen as absurd by seemingly anyone that prided themselves in reading books

I wonder if that book smell experience is core to those people

I can smell it, and I remember it from being a kid too but the downsides to me outweighed it and I had choices then too. The downsides being that physical books don't keep their page and are uncomfortable to hold, more so for kid hands, and laying down in bed to read or trying to prop up a book exacerbated its technological inferiority.

I always suspected for others that the smell was a greater part of the experience and association with reading a book. and maybe some prior social benefits doing it in public.

There's some combination of snobbery, appreciating the tactile nature of physical books, and having bookshelves and piles of books in the house that appeal to many people.

IMO ebooks are inferior for some purposes. Books that are meant to be appreciated as books--e.g. books of photography. Cookbooks in which I make notes and put stickies. Various other cases.

But if I'm mostly just reading flowing text, especially fiction but non-fiction as well I appreciate a format that lets me carry a library in a form factor that's smaller than a hardcover and which I can easily read in any lighting conditions.

I think ereaders are a worse UI for all but wholly linear, light reading. If I’m reading some trashy fiction, ereaders don’t bother me—anything else, and they’re worse than a real book.

The two-page-at-a-time interface is a ton better and enables features like facing-page translations or setting a full-page illustration or other graphic opposite some text. Got two (largish) books, you can have both open and visible at the same time, four total pages. Footnotes are a lot better in a real book. Typesetters can control formatting—text placement on the page, were page-turns fall, that kind of thing—much better, so poetry texts may be better in a real book. I find holding or marking an endnote or index section and flipping back and forth to that faster, and less error-prone than doing the same on an ereader.

The book being a distinct physical object aids with memory. You see the title and author as it sits on the table in a room you’re occupying, even if you’re not reading it (I’ll often forget who wrote an ebook I’m reading, even if I’ve spent hours with it). Spatial memory is powerful. I not-uncommonly use it to locate parts of a book kinda by feel, like tracing a familiar but poorly marked trail in the woods. Ebooks feel like trying to find a particular spot on the open ocean, with no stars and out of sight of land.

Full text search is the only directly book-related feature of ebooks that I think gives them an edge, but that’s no replacement for a good index, and if I had to pick only one of the two, I’d take the index. It’s pretty good, though.

What remains in their favor is compactness, and boy is that a big advantage, so I do read ebooks even for some books I’d prefer to read on paper. But IMO the UI is, overall, a whole lot worse than a real book.

[edit] oops, sold ebooks short on one point: you don’t need to hunt down separate large-print editions, with them. Same thing that makes them so bad for text that benefits from a human having taken care with text formatting and placement, makes them great if you need large print.

I was under the impression that all books smell "good" (or in any case, smells that are quite distinctive and generally not disagreeable). With time the scent changes.

Together with the tactile feel of the densely stacked pages the physical experience of books is just phemomenal.

I remember Dr Dobbs journals in the 90s would have a strange plasticy smell. Whenever I smell that smell in a new book I have memories of the newsagent I used to buy them from and nostalgia for the enjoyment a new issue would bring.

Kind of disappointing that we don't have the technology to store smells, say, in an iPad, and retrieve them when we open an e-reader app.

Scent was the first sense that we acquired in evolution, yet the last one we technologically master.

This was exactly what I was contemplating when I read that article. I believe that olfactory-augmented innovations could undoubtedly enhance the value of devices that are currently only performing acrobatics (flipping and folding).

Don't forget VR helmets.

There have been multiple attempts at this. None have ever been successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_scent_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_and_sniff

Novelty items at best, I can't imagine any VC getting excited about this stuff. But I didn't imagine they'd get excited about crypto either :)

To actually synthesize the smell molecules would pretty much require (Star Trek) replicator levels of technology.

Also, if/when we do have them, I'm sure that HN will fill up with inflammatory content about whether it's ok that the companies that make them only sell a "censored" model that disallows synthesizing toxins.

I'm not sure if that is true. E.g. we might be able to synthesize smells like we cook food, where there is little to no danger of producing toxins from innocent ingredients.

"But I want the real, cancer-causing new car smell with benzene and styrene VOCs!"

Home theater odor playback was already tried in the 70's and 80's and it was a colossal failure. Argument about it is moot because it's a stupid idea that went nowhere, and that doesn't even begin to address attempting to make a mass spec digital nose. Plus, it's unlikely odors are noticed or perceived uniformly across individuals.

That's only if we're trying to replicate the smells physically though right? I mean, we could also trigger the brains neurons to "think" that we're smelling something. Not sure how we'd know which ones to fire, but with brain implants advancing I wouldn't be surprised if this became a reality one day.

Neither desirable nor possible.

My dad lost his sense of smell during a surgery and he says he doesn’t miss it in the slightest. Makes no difference in how good food tastes or anything else he encounters in life. In the modern world, it really is a “nice to have” sense.

I have always thought that food taste is much more smell than actual taste. Taste is rather limited in complexity with only 5 tastes, compared to hundreds of different smells. Or so I heard.

You are right. Last year I've got a virus named covid (probably you have heard of it). For a few days I've lost the taste of food. I mostly stopped to eat in such days. Eating food that tasted of nothing was totally unpleasant!

Lignin breaking down smells nice, sure. but let's not forget, old books might be carrying mold spores that can trigger allergies or worse. Not to mention asbestos which was used in bookbinding till the 70s.

My favorite scent maker sells one that captures this, and it's pretty good:

https://www.cbihateperfume.com/306

Ha! This post immediately made me think of this old gem:

https://smellofbooks.com/

I’m glad someone made it real!

Always loved the smell of ink in books and graphic novels. Often times the first thing I do when I have a new book is just open it halfway and burry my nose in between the pages. Maybe it is a fetish? Hmmm. Never thought of that.

I also always enjoyed smelling the gas at gas stations when I was a kid, would open the window.

I do wonder if it's a psychological thing, or if there is really some chemical substance that is slightly addictive.

>What chemicals cause that nostalgic old book smell?

>Compounds like benzaldehyde, vanillin, ethylbenzene, and 2-ethyl hexanol are often responsible for old book scents. Benzaldehyde has an almond-like scent, vanillin smells like vanilla, ethylbenzene is sweet and plastic-y, and 2-ethyl hexanol is lightly floral.

All of these are chemicals having very characteristic strong odors in their pure form, and can be somewhat overwhelming.

Ethylbenzene is an Aromatic hydrocarbon normally found in major concentrations in some paints and thinners, and industrial felt-tip markers containing the xylene-based inks which are flammable, toxic and can make you dizzy breathing too much.

2-Ethylhexanol smells even worse, it's really rough. If you get one drop on your foot, you're going to want to leave your shoes outside when you get home.

These kind of things just smell unique and are detectable in such low concentrations, plus can form a type of barely perceptible "bouquet" that imprints well enough to guide a potential effort toward its elusive source.

I would have to estimate the dose makes the poison like so many other things. Freshly printed publications seem to have more solvent offgassing than aged materials.

> 2-Ethylhexanol smells even worse, it's really rough. If you get one drop on your foot, you're going to want to leave your shoes outside when you get home.

I find it really fascinating the differences in subjective experience of various smells. Personally I find 2-EH to be sweet, almost sickly sweet but not overpowering, floral and vaguely fruity. It's not directly nice, like vanillin, but it's not bad, like pyridine or butyric acid.

Now that reminds me also of the glue that we used in secondary school and also art school. Smelling it would definitely give a little high/dizzy feeling, whereas smelling the air at the gastation for me is more of a dopamine kick.

I wish the artical attempted to address the "good smell" part of the title.

I read this article and I didn't find it engaging... It lists some of the chemicals that cause the small. It's no suprise that there are aromatic chemicals that cause it.

I would really like to know why they small good? Is it like petrichor? Childhood experiences that influence my perception?

Vanillin, benzaldehyde, and 2-ethylhexanol are all found in edible plants, and in particular, those three smell very good.

Paper is wood pulp (natively comprising lignocellulose) where the lignin has been broken down. The lignin breakdown products are primarily polyphenols (the building blocks of lignin), including vanillin and related compounds, which for whatever reason smell really good to us. The smoky smell of wood char and campfires? Polyphenols.

What about Magic The Gathering cards? I started playing during Weatherlight as a kid and the smell of those cards was like crack for some reason.

I'm sure it was just some carcinogenic chemicals though.

My great great grandmothers house smelled like old books. Very found memories as a child associated with this very special sent. :)

We just need a Franciscan friar with a melodious Scottish voice and we're all set for a murder mystery.

Whatever it is, I’d you concentrate it 10000x and inject it in mice it probably causes cancer.

Old books don't smell good. They provoke allergies.

So is it a health hazard to work in a museum library?

If you mean a library of old books, yes, it can be if toxic books are not properly handled.

Depends if the building has Legionnaire's or asbestos.

Moldy books also exist. Those can't be great for your lungs.

Apparently I wasn't the only one.

Not to be THAT guy, but I'm getting a definite ChatGPTish generative text feel from that article. The short sections, the FAQ restating the details from the article three paragraphs ago, etc. I hate to lead a witch hunt, but...

Does it matter, any more than it would matter if a human author was a 10 year old or a Nobel laureate?

Yes, the author's background matters when judging the value of a text. A nobel laureate is usually correct about the basics of their own field. I wouldn't trust a 10 year old child's knowledge about poisons. Even though some 10 year old child somewhere might know their poisons better than most experts.

I felt that the FAQs were definitely bolted on by an LLM. Maybe they were trying to pad it out?

Yeah the FAQ section was weird and unnecessary. I figured it's some kind of SEO gimmick.

chatgpt vibes, huh? maybe the author's just a fan. or we're all bots in disguise. plot twist!

On a side note, i can't help but wonder if, in a few centuries, someone will be analyzing the 'VOC' equivalent of old USB sticks to determine which early 2000s computer they came from

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