Perhaps my title’s a bit hyperbolic, but writing today’s other smell-related post got me fondly recalling my favorite sentence (and there was good competition) from Nicholson Baker’s 1997 essay collection, The Size of Thoughts , which is—with a few diversions—a string of celebrations of commonplace cultural objects, often starting at the point before the starting point: the smell of a fresh book, the friendly rattle of a model airplane kit still in the box
This may be the funniest and best-smelling work of profound lexicographical slang-scholarship ever published. Some may respect the hint of Elmer’s glue in recent printings of Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed.) , or the faint traces of burlap and cocoa-bean that linger deep in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang , or even the fume of indoor swimming-pool that clings to the paper-bound decolletage of Slang!: The Topic-By-Topic Dictionary of Contemporary American Lingoes. But a single deep draught of J. E. Lighter’s magnificent Historical Dictionary of American Slang (volume I, A-G) is a higher order of experience: it smells like a high-ceilinged bare room freshly painted white - clean and sunlit, full of reverberative promise and proud of its mitered corners, although with a mildly intoxicating or hyperventilational ‘finish’…
from “Leading with the Grumper,” by Nicholson Baker, The New York Review of Books , 11 August 1994, collected in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber :: via New Scientist