If you have torn yourself away from the virtual library that is the Internet long enough to visit a real library, you know that the smell of old books — musty, slightly acidic, even grassy — is instantly recognizable. But is it quantifiable? And if so, might old-book odor prove useful to librarians and conservators charged with preserving collections?
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Dr. Strlic said he got the idea one day at a library when he saw a conservator sniffing an old piece of paper, trying to determine what it was made of. “I thought, certainly a technique could be developed to do that more accurately,” he said. The approach is similar to breath analysis used to diagnose illness, he added.
He and his colleagues analyzed the volatiles produced by 72 samples of old paper of different types and in varying condition from the 19th and 20th centuries, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that some compounds were reliable markers for paper with certain characteristics — high concentrations of lignin or rosin, for example, which make paper degrade relatively quickly. Their findings were published in the journal Analytical Chemistry.
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