Books About Smells

“Smelling the Books” performance by Rachael Morrison, Senior Library Assistant at MoMA

I’m straight copying this from Scented Pages, “the virtual library catalogue dedicated to the culture of smell.” They put together a great list, and these are some of the rare/more interesting ones I found.

Cosmologies, Structuralism, and the Sociology of Smell

Marcello Aspria, November 7, 2008

[pdf]

Stamelman, Richard, A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present. New York: Rizzoli (2006)

Smith, Mark M., Sensing the past: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching in history. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press (2007)

Moeran, Brian, 'Japanese Fragrance Descriptives and Gender Constructions: Preliminary Steps towards an Anthropology of Olfaction'. In: Etnofoor, XVIII (1), pp. 97-123 (2005)

Classen, Constance, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures. London, New York: Routledge (1993)

Collins, Randall, Four Sociological Traditions. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press (1994)

[haptic vs visual vs olfactory cultures]

Sagarin, Edward, The Science and Art of Perfumery. First edition. London, New York:

McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. (1945)

The Sociology of Odors. Gale Peter Largey and David Rodney Watson. American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 77, No. 6 (May, 1972), pp. 1021-1034

Takagi, S. Human Olfaction: From Art to Science. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press (1989)

Ohloff, Gunther. Earthly Scents, Heavenly Pleasures: A Cultural History of Scents

New York: Wiley-VCH (2006)

Howes, David. "Olfaction and Transition", in: David Howes, ed. The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (1991)

Bronwen, Martin, Felizitas Ringham (eds.). Sense and Scent: An Exploration of Olfactory Meaning. London: Philomel Productions Ltd (2004)

Blackson, Robert. If There Ever Was: a book of extinct and impossible smells. Sunderland: Art Editions North, University of Sunderland (2008)

Almagor, U. Odors and Private Language: Observations on the Phenomenology of Scent

in: Human Studies, vol. 13, pp. 253-74 (1990)