The Paper Trail

How the smell of old books recalls memories of youth and a lesson in ageing gracefully.

- Jerry Pinto

“When I was home, manuscripts surrounded me. My friends told me, ‘you have gone crazy. You can’t talk about anything else.’ I said, ‘leave me alone.’ The manuscripts had a certain smell, and they said ‘you are smelling of manuscripts, Abdel Kadir.’”

—The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer (Simon & Schuster, 2016)

Every so often, some young person discovers that the attar-makers of X place in India—sometimes Jaipur, sometimes Mumbai, sometimes Falaananagar—have invented a perfume that smells like petrichor, the earth after rain. I wonder why no one has ever thought to make an attar that smells of old books. Could it be because they are generally ahl-e kitaab, people of the book? And the beautiful smell of a book is the smell of its ageing?