The Woman Who Smells Books

She's planning on smelling 300,000 of them and take note of them in a ledger.

In a piece from New York Magazine...

After artist Rachael Morrison, 29, started working at the MoMA library, she’d joke that she was “smelling books” all day. She loves being surrounded by all these books in an increasingly digitized age—they already seem like artifacts. She began wondering what it would be like not to be able to smell them anymore. “When you read a book, you become immersed in this way that feels very special and individual,” she says. Unlike when you read something online, where “I always have this sense that whatever I am reading is being read by millions of other people.” So six months ago, she decided to spend her lunch breaks chronicling the unique scent of each book in the MoMA stacks.

There are 300,000 books in the collection. She’s smelled 150 so far. Each entry is logged in pencil in an accounting ledger. “It’s a daring idea,” says David Senior, a MoMA bibliographer and friend, “because some of our books smell really bad.”