New York Magazine highlights a woman smelling all the books in the MoMA library. She's smelled 150 books so far, and kept notes.
Apparently, there's a history of this activity:
Last year, in an article in the journal Analytical Chemistry, researchers led by a group from University College London’s Centre for Sustainable Heritage attempted to define the odor of old books as “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” The smell of books comes from the volatile organic compounds that paper emits as it decays. But in truth, there are as many book smells as there are books: Paper can be made from any number of trees and treated with any number of chemicals, and many types of inks and glues have been used through the years. It also depends on where the books were stored.
