A Nose for Books
Submitted by mwilliams on Wed, 2008-04-16 16:25.Scottish scientists are searching for the antidote to decaying books by bottling the atmosphere of the British Library in test tubes and using mass spectrometers to isolate the chemicals given off by decaying paper…by their smell. Armed with this info, researchers hope to design a chemical ‘nose’ that can be placed on library shelves to give the alarm when the decaying process begins.
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I can see "CSI: Library" series being made out of this.
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
Growing up in Florida, you learn the effects of rot and roaches on books. The smell my elementary school library gave off was remarkably like the Everglades. A smaller Western mind would probably see this as Paradise successfully devouring the tree of knowledge, but I eventually sat motionless, either reading or merely watching and not reading, long enough to learn a deeper truth; it's the smell of life itself. Knowledge and rot are both equally what we leave behind. They can be remarkably similar in very precious ways.