54together wrote:
I LOVE the smell of pages in books! I'm not a big reader, but I love putting my face right up to books and sniffing all the pages.
Oh, and getting into a hot car. The sensation isn't nice, but the smell is.
![Razz :P](./images/smilies/icon_razz.gif)
Some (new) books smell better than others, depending on the quality of the paper the publisher uses. I've encountered some small paperback-only houses whose books actually smelled bad, but most are quite pleasant. Not as fond of the smell of old books, although it can lend itself to a sense of character, that the book has survived for so long and I have to respect that. I do not like the odors of library books, though, they carry the scent of all the sweaty hands and greasy thumbs that have gripped their spines and flipped their pages and that's just nasty.
I generally abhor perfumes and colognes, they bite my sinuses like ammonia, though Jovan's Musk for girls and Avon's Sweet Honesty have pleasant associations from my youth, but even those depend very much on the body chemistry of the wearer - they don't smell the same on everybody. I worked with a lovely black girl several years ago whose perfume was so heavenly it was absolutely intoxicating. She told me what it was and for the life of me I can't recall the name, but the scent was so soft and such a perfect mixture of fruity and floral that every time she walked past my work area, I felt compelled to get up and follow her.
The smell of apples makes a nice household potpourri, as do pumpkin and cinnamon. One of my favorite smells in the whole world, though, was the smell of a freshly opened vinyl record album. Slide the edge across the leg of your jeans to slit the shrink-wrap, squeeze open and inhale deeply through the nose. Man, that was almost a sexual high. Cds just never had that magic.
But the best smell on the planet - and its very subtle, I'm not even sure everyone can sense it - is the smell of Autumn. I don't mean artificially concocted commercial scents, I mean actual Autumn. The smell of the year turning back toward winter. Some years you can catch it wafting on the breeze in the latest days of Summer, drifting in from a distance, even before the grass has died and the leaves have started to turn. Those are the best years for it - if you can pick up the hint of it at the end of August, or in September, its going to be a beautiful fall. Then you can rake up all those leaves in late October and warm your hands in the cool twilight to the smell of burning Autumn leaves and that's an olfactory poetry all its own.