Elegies for that soon-to-be-defunct artefact, the book, frequently wax lyrical about its most evanescent quality: the smell of the pages. Robert Darnton, in The Case for Books, refers to a survey of French students in which 43% of respondents said that the lack of scent put them off electronic books; he also reports that one French online publisher distributes a sticker that gives off a ‘fusty, bookish smell’, to ease the transition to the new medium. You can buy ‘a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer’ (see http://smellofbooks.com/) for the same purpose. Or you can join around 100 other people mulling on the mystique of the bookish aroma at LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/topic/10361).

For Richard Lanham, ‘our cultural vitals are isomorphic with the codex book. Its very feel and heft and look and smell are talismanic’. A friend of mine once complained that modern writers overuse the word ‘heft’–presumably because, in its simplicity and unfamiliarity, it carries some of the physical weight that it describes. And I’ve always felt that the book-smell argument was a rather desperate, last-ditch defence of the book. Surely we can do better than that!

But now the final nail is being hammered into the coffin of my cynicism, as the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld announces a new perfume, ‘Paper Passion’, based on the smell of the book, and sold encased in a hollowed-out hardback. The genuine bibliophile will be able to wear the scent of the codex on their person, and the nostalgia that clings to paper, dust and glue will be sublimated into the stuff of love.

Those guys at Amazon had better be very afraid…

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/karl-lagerfeld-to-create-fragrance-that-smells-of-books-2270503.html

CMT members – and particularly followers of our fledgling ‘Illegibles’ section – may be interested to learn something of the technique of multi-spectral digital imaging.  It has been employed in the study of a substantial number of ancient manuscript texts, such as the Archimedes Palimpsest, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Herculaneum Papyri, and the Petra Church Scrolls, and was recently the subject of a retrospective in the journal Antiquity.  The technology was also featured on the Monday edition of Radio 4’s I.T. programme, ‘Click On’, in connection with the David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project. 

The project’s website provides before and after images of one of Livingstone’s letters, plus a transcription and commentary, as well as background information about both the explorer and the imaging techniques.  Livingstone’s letter from Bambarre (Kabambare, eastern Congo), dates from 5^th February 1871 (see image above), and besides revealing the desperate situation in which Livingstone found himself towards the end of his career, it provides a window into a fascinating material textual moment.  Having run out of both paper and ink, Livingstone resorted to using old copies of the Standard newspaper and the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society as a writing support, and some local clothing pigment as substitute ink.  Neither worked particularly well: the paper is now very worn and fragile, the manuscript text often unclear due to fading or bleed-through.  The text of Livingstone’s Nyangwe Diary is almost entirely illegible in natural light (see images below).  These palimpsests hint at the material privations through which Livingstone lived, and the text of Livingstone’s letter is a response to the first contact he had had with the outside world for several years.  Thanks to spectral imaging, we can now read those spectral words.

The city of Bologna has more graffiti than any other city in Italy. When I was there last week I noticed just how much writing on the walls there is: as well as graffiti, Bologna’s streets and buildings are covered with a multitude of posters, fliers, banners, and flags…

I was reminded of  Juliet Fleming’s fabulous discussion of Elizabethan wall-writing in Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (2001), where she emphasises that ‘defacement’ can operate ‘as a principle of textual production’, and that graffiti can be understood as something which ‘appears within an intellectual economy that values the utterance of common-places, and tolerates the appearance of writing as a thing among things’ (p. 51).