The Scent of Production

Phoebe Pan

The scent of production: not entirely human, yet not wholly industrial. Hints of petrochemicals and bleach. Clean and impersonal. Production as synonym for scent: one can never truly see the means by which it emerges, or how it operates, though its effects and results linger in the material world. The scent of production is not of any one object or entity, but of a process. It strives to overcome its own afternote: decay.

Over the past decade, I’ve acquired three hardcover box sets: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, published by VIZ Media), Dungeon Meshi (Ryoko Kui, published by Yen Press), and Stonetop, a TTRPG setting and system (Jeremy Strandberg, published by Lampblack & Brimstone). I bought the Nausicaä box set at the end of high school as a graduation gift for myself; Dungeon Meshi was gifted to me last Christmas; Stonetop was a recent splurge in my search for an alternative to a D&D campaign framework. Three different authors, three different publishers. Why, then, do all three of these box sets smell identical?

The paper varies across each of the sets, so my conclusion, at first, was that the shared scent profile must come from the binding glue, as well as the way the books are contained in each box. Since the pages are enclosed, the paper has a slower oxidation rate, which allows the sets to retain a “new book” scent. Now, you may be thinking—duh, so that means they’re from the same printer! Or they use the same glue! To which I say: Unsettling! Materially, there’s nothing distinct or unique in the scent of each of these sets. The Nausicaä books, which I’ve lugged through countless cross-country moves and cracked open frequently, still smell the same as they did over ten years ago. The scent had been nostalgic until I acquired Dungeon Meshi and Stonetop, realizing that it was not, in fact, a product of memory, but a product of some unseen printing process I had yet to acknowledge. Scent, which Proust and perfume companies describe as intimately individual, slipped out of the realm of my own grasp, into the anonymous collective: the scent of production.

Paper strips are often described as a “clinical” way to examine and test perfumes, since paper has a more “neutral” odor than your skin and body. When I first heard about this, I thought it an odd way to describe paper, as clinical. Any paper aficionado could rave about the signature “musty yet pleasant” scent of secondhand books, or the wonders of washi made from radish leaves, or the notes of sandalwood and hibiscus one might find in vats of pulp. But now, I’m starting to wonder if clinical is an apt description of paper at a larger scale: clinical, as in detached, as in smoothed of its unique defining characteristics to serve as a template for more general applications of capital.

Nowadays, a significant portion of commercially sold books are printed overseas, and as the publishing industry has expanded, book production has been consolidated to a few select companies that handle thousands of projects and press demands each year. Production has been homogenized, and fewer boutique printers exist—meaning that most commercial books have the same sensory feel, even as their covers and designs vary (though one might notice the creeping uniformity of several generic tendencies, even in the visual realm). Standardized paper weight, standardized binding material, standardized machinery. None of this is particularly novel or surprising, given how widely commercial books are distributed and the scale at which they are made. At the end of the day, large-scale production is impersonal and anonymous.

What, then, creates that “old book smell” that bibliophiles so eagerly chase? Paper is made from plant fibers (flax, bamboo, straw, or more commonly now, wood pulp), which contain a polymer known as lignin. Lignin breaks down and oxidizes when exposed to air over time, which results in the cellulose of the paper breaking down as well. As these plant fibers break down, they release “volatile organic compounds,” which are responsible for the odor of scents. Lignin is similar in chemical structure to vallinin, which gives vanilla its flavor and scent; combined with the grassy undertones of the plant fibers themselves, these compounds gesture to why “old book smells” are beloved by some, and polarizing to many—the sweet, vanilla-almond top note, followed by the undertones of woody and earthy musk. Perhaps the comfort is in the domesticity of the vallinin, which evokes baking and morning coffee; food scents, after all, activate the brain’s dopamine response more readily than non-food scents. Or perhaps the allure of old book scents is strongly tied to autobiographical memory, evoking childhood days spent curled with novels in the library. In any case, the essential note, surprisingly, is decay.

Ten years isn’t enough time for a book to drastically change in its scent profile, but I am interested in the ways in which modern books are made “against decay.” A lot of contemporary, high-quality papers undergo chemical processes that remove lignin, which slows the breakdown of cellulose in paper. Older books, especially ones printed before the 1990s, did not undergo these chemical processes, hence their more potent “old book” scents. Bleaching can strengthen paper fibers and make pages more resilient, but as a tradeoff, these chemical processes mean that decades from now, modern books won’t retain the same kinds of scent that folks find so romantic in pre-1990 printed books.

If scent is intimately tied to place and time, then what does it mean to lose the granular details of both in manufacturing processes? Even this distinction between the longevity of modern versus old books is thin: while the actual paper quality of modern books may be stronger and less prone to decomposition, these books are still mass produced at the end of the day. Medieval scribes, for example, would have thought some of their books to be primed “against decay” as well, with their leather-bound, hand-stitched construction and artisanal care—not to mention the culture of reverence that followed these books, given their status as formal, often liturgical documents. So perhaps what I am trying to measure is the difference between the precious, if inaccessible, rarity of a first century manuscript made against decay, versus the unsettling demand for 21st century perfect-bound novels, printed in the hundreds of thousands, to be made durable and constant at a far greater scale.

I think, too, about the distance between the material scent of a modern book versus what perfume companies, time and again, have tried to reproduce as the enigmatic and romantic “book scent”—based more on atmospheres of reading than on actual paper pulp, as if the scent was never about the books themselves but about the environments that they appear in. If scent is tied to memory, then memory must be tied to decay, for memory takes shape not in the exact verisimilitude of a scene but in the small errors and misprints that make it your memory and not simply a photographic reproduction. Imagine, then, a book made against decay: does it affect the afterimage of memories that emerge? Does it render memory more uniform? Does it depersonalize memory, so that what I truly remember is not the experience of reading it but the printing house that produced it, which I have never seen or visited?

What is, indeed, the scent of production?

The “smelliest” book I own is my copy of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which I’ve lent to countless friends, which I’ve stained with strawberry juice, which is slightly waterlogged in one corner, which I’ve left in suitcases, which I’ve read under the shade of a tree on the lakefront as the wind brought the scent of goose shit to my nose. The copy isn’t specially printed or bound: it is the same generic mass market paperback, published by Knopf, with thin margins and yellowing paper, that everyone else owns. Perhaps I’m simply speeding up the inevitable and aging the book horribly through its materiality, but perhaps, too, it is in decay that things take on their proof of meaning. The scent of production is not made for humans or individuals—it is made for the leviathan of capitalism. We glimpse its notes, but that does not mean we must wear it, for there are other scents that so define our storied days: the flowers in the eaves, the sweat-stained armchair, the oil of your thumb on a page that changes your life.