A wonderful book to read and reread and savor the descriptions of smells and what they remind us plus some historical, scientific, and sociological facts about them,

Vivid photography in this short book about scented materials, their properties, and their uses. Also includes suggestions and a partial directory of shops. A nice addition to the genre.

I love these Chic Simple books. They're tiny, well illustrated, and every page ends with a period. They bill themselves as primers "for living well but sensibly in the 1990s ... for those who believe that quality of life does not come in accumulating things, but in paring down in the essentials. The more you know, the less you need." Here are a few essential quotes, culled from the pages of Scents (1993), that I thought you needed to know.

"Musk, the most tenacious scent, is still detected in one-thousand-year-old mosques constructed with perfumed mortar that exude scent when heated by the sun."

"Elizabethan women offered 'love apples' imbued with their underarm sweat to ardent suitors."

"The sweet-orange groves of Mediterranean Europe are the progeny of a single tree, still preserved in Lisbon, that Vasco da Gama brought back from China."

"Stick to simple ideas and apply them scrupulously." – Pierre François Pascal, founder of the House of Guerlain

"In India, sun-blinds imbued with vetiver are watered down at midday to add scent to every incoming breeze."

"The sense of smell is the sense of imagination." – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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A short, precise & fragrant experience