Saturday, October 6, 2012

You Can't Judge a Book by Its...Odor?

Whenever I'm taking a trip via highway, I like to stop at used book stores that happen to be along the route. I did so this past weekend and made a nice little haul.

Which makes this little note from the good folks at Mental Floss interesting, as writer Matt Soniak noted some researchers analyzed the different smells given off by the materials of which books are made to see what different kinds of odors might mean. They think it may be possible to use that analysis to determine how old a book is.

But they'll be using all kinds of chemistry equipment and things; it's unlikely that a good sniff of an old book will tell you or I anything other than, "It's time to sneeze now."

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