People assume that I’m only kidding when I advocate the publication of a scratch-and-sniff version of Melville’s Moby Dick, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Proust’s Combray, or Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. Au contraire! I am ready and willing to develop olfactory editions of great literary works. Notice I say olfactory editions. Use of the low-brow scratch and sniff — or worse — scratch ‘n’ sniff — could not possibly advance my cause with academic publishers. And odorama will be forever linked to the glorious king of kitsch, John Waters, who has riffed on the idea of his own celebrity perfume, cleverly named Eau de Waters, “the smell of an obsessed film fanatic.”1 Another earnestly eccentric social observer, Honoré de Balzac, came very close to coining odorama in his novel Père Goriot (1835). There characters fling “-orama“ wordplay across the table (corn-orama, soup-orama, health-orama, death-orama), while dining in one of French fiction’s smelliest boarding houses. Its sticky, rancid, musty, scullery-and-hospital reek, “charged by the catarrhal exhalations of every individual lodger living there,” certainly merits the term, along with a place of honor on an odorama sniff card.
There are loads of scratch-and-sniff books for children, and even for the dog who has everything (See Spot Smell). But the selection of fragrance-enhanced reading for grown-up humans remains slim. And buyer, beware. A search for adult olfactory literature will turn up some seedy stuff. Not campy, self-aware seedy; just boorish, irony-deficient seedy. Think bodies and bodily functions. Think used copies.
Novelty books such as the borderline sadistic Zero Calorie Desserts: The Seven Day Scratch and Sniff Diet (how cruel is that?) haven’t caught on. With a goofy cover and forced pun of a name, Nosetalgia: The Smells that Take you Back promises a visual and olfactory revival of childhood smells such as Vick’s Vaporub, Coppertone, and Red Hots. These sound interesting, but redundant. It is not as if the smells are lost and gone forever. However, I see the original Herbal Essence (not Herbal Essences) shampoo and Bonnie Bell Ten-O-Six on the sniff list, and my heart skips a beat. Click. I’ve ordered. New, not used.
On the other hand, wouldn’t it be great to read about perfume materials, classic fragrances, and the history of perfumery, while sampling scents from the pages of a book? Just when I thought all hope was lost for anything but gimmicks in multi-sensory volumes, I discovered Annick Le Guérer’s Once Upon a Time…Perfume. Originally published in French as Si le parfum m’était conté.., this elegant, hard-cover book opens with a preface by Osmothèque President Patricia de Nicolaï-Michau (perfumer and co-founder of the stunning Parfums de Nicolaï line). Each of three parts (“The Versailles Osmothèque, “Leading Fragrance Companies,” and “Perfume’s Eminent Maisons”) offers rich, full-page illustrations, with scratch-and-sniff samples of perfumes, including Schiaparelli Shocking, Coty L’Origan, and Caron Tabac Blond.
True, the fragrances smell a bit soapy in this format. True, once you’ve scratched and sniffed a few of the 12 featured perfumes,2 the book smells like a vintage department store. But none of this dampens the pleasure of reading about perfume ingredients and the Roman Empire while sampling the first-century A.D. concoction, Parfum Royal.
Now don’t let the coffee-table-friendly appeal lead you astray. From these colorful pages radiates a sillage of well-mannered but tenacious manifesto. Every whiff of Chanel No. 5 and Bal à Versailles accompanies a narrative celebration of olfactory culture, an articulation of the Osmothèque’s mission to support the art of perfumery, to resist mass marketing, to educate, and to preserve great (and endangered) perfumes.
Fragrant readers, this would be the perfect gift for perfumistas, if it were not so difficult to find. I bought my copy after Luca Turin’s presentation, The Art of Fragrance, at the French Embassy in in Washington D.C. The book is available in French at the e.vous website, with an enigmatic and existential allusion to its English translation (“Existe en anglais”), sans directions for how to order that edition. My efforts to obtain details have so far gone unanswered. For now, I take a leap of faith: it exists, therefore it can be ordered. Let’s persevere, because Once Upon a Time…Perfume is the next best thing to the ultimate osmorama: attending an interactive, in-person workshop at the Osmothèque.
Once Upon a Time…Perfume
Annick Le Guérer
France, Éditions du Garde-Temps 2009
Hardcover, 128 pages
1. From John Waters’ 2010 book Role Models, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
2. The twelve perfumes are:
Parfum Royal
Houbigant Quelques Fleurs
Chevalier d’Orsay Bal à Versailles
Schiaparelli Shocking
Coty L’Origan
Guy Laroche J’ai Osé
Guerlain Ode
Caron Tabac Blond
Jean Patou Joy
Chanel No. 5
Lancôme Trésor
Christian Dior Miss Dior
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A perfume history with scents so you can understand what the writer is talking about. A great idea.
I am actually in the middle of reading Moby Dick (I swear this time I actually get the book, and I WILL actually finish it. ).
Melville wants to tell readers everything possible about whaling. This is the part of the book I used to find annoying, just when the plot gets going, he detours the reader into a discussion of the color white, or mid-eastern history of reports of beached leviathans, now I am used to post-modern hyperlinked reading, and I enjoy this). So I think he would loved to provide his readers with the scent of the Inn where two types of chowder are cooked all day, or of the New England coast, or of a sperm whale being butchered at sea. But how on earth could one possibly reproduce the latter?
Hmm. Good point! I might focus on the musky scent of Bedford and the ambergris!
Oh, yes, Ambergis must have been so much more common then.
Thanks for a thoroughly entertaining review, Cheryl! Love your attitude toward the French website…
And, my god, Nosetalgia. Someone–many someones!–had to think that title was a good idea. The mind boggles.
Thanks Alyssa!
There is a coffee-loving character in Moby Dick named Starbucks…which is the source of the name of the coffee chain. If you ever make it to New Bedford, MA you can go to the actual chapel that was the inspiration for the one in Moby Dick. It’s a beautiful little area there, right next to water. It was a major center for the waling industry a few hundred years ago.
Excellent bit of trivia about Starbucks, thanks! I must confess to not having waded through Moby Dick myself yet- I would have struggled to get into it when younger but now I look forward to delving in.
Whoops- hit post too quickly…
I wanted to second the recommendation about New Bedford MA. It is very pretty there and you could also go along to Gloucester and Salem as well, both lovely seafaring towns. Salem has the added attraction of AromaSanctum Perfumes as well!
I haven’t met a city in Maine that I didn’t like. I’ll check it out eventually!
Love that Starbuck appearance!
Ten-0-Six gave me a total flashback- Strong enough to make the skin on my face feel two sizes too small yet I relished using it because it was advertised in Seventeen magazine!
LOL
I could use the skin on my face feeling two sizes too small these days!
Cheryl, what a wonderful review! Of course, I immediately went to Amazon to check out the sniffy book for dogs & found that most of the reviews said it either didn’t smell or didn’t smell as it should. And, really, my dogs are so bombarded with smells just from a walk around the block that ordering books for them seems like gilding the lily anyway.
I wonder why the technology for this is so hard to get down. You’d think there could be a plastic slipcase for each board-page to prevent the smells from mingling & becoming mush. I guess I’d try plastic page protectors with the sides slit for that. Not perfect, but maybe it would help a little?
Your Pere Goriot mention makes me thankful, again, that I live in such pleasantly scented times. Thanks!
I”m pretty sure my dogs would chew up a scented board book!
Cheryl, you wrote such an excellent review that I would not be daunted in my search for the book. Et voila! The title is different in the English version. It’s available through Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Scent-Mysterious-Essential-Powers-Kodansha/dp/156836024X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1290865730&sr=1-3
Unfortunately, only in paperback and the hard cover version selling through Amazon’s sellers are going for $155 new. Yikes!
Edited to add: When I clicked on the link to buy the soft cover version, there was a link for the hardcover version from other Amazon sellers for under $10! Not sure why it originally showed up for so much money.
Thank you Rappelea!
The link seems to be for one of her earlier books–not “Si le parfum…/Once upon a time…” IT looks like a good book, especially at the price.
Oh! Then I misunderstood her page. When I read the list of books there, I didn’t see Si le Parfum, just this one translated into English. Did I miss it?
“Si le parfum m’etait conte” is called “Once upon a time perfume” in English. If you clack on the link to the Luca Turin talk on the Art of Fragrance that I mention there is a photo of the book cover there.The mysery continues…
I also bought this book at the lecture. I really enjoy it, although I haven’t actually scratched the scratch and sniff patches yet – I’m saving them for some special occasion, I guess, LOL! Hope it will be more widely available at some point.
I understand. I didn’t scratch the panels until i began reviewing the book. And truth be told, some are still unscratched.
We must have see each other there without knowing it, Nozknoz!
There is a manga series — I seem to recall it being named Antique Bakery in the U.S. editions — that, for the US first print run, had a scratch and sniff patch on the cover of each volume. Each volume had a different patch that was supposed to smell like a different dessert. I never actually read the series (I think it’s about beautiful boys longing after each other, set in a bakery), I just remember scratching the covers in my local Waldenbooks before it closed.
So that’s where all of those used scratch and sniiff books come from