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Valeska Soares

Valeska Soares sorts through piles of old papers on the gallery floor the way a painter would fuss over her palette. But she isn’t looking for colours, and her most recent hunt constituted a search for confessions of love.Love Stories is a work made up of 125 books with the word ‘love’ in the title. Published by the artist herself, and arranged neatly on a bookshelf as if purloined from the library of some inconsolable lothario, the volumes in five different languages mimic the effect of the dedicatory collage upstairs. From far away they are a colourful display of hidden meaning. When the titles are browsed one after another at close range, a lyrical poem begins to compose itself, one that celebrates the buoyancy of love while also speaking to the bitter weight of stories that sometimes end with irreparably damaged hearts.

Frances Pickering

Horace O'Sullivan

Artists Rifles roll of honour

Horace Alexander O Sullivan United Kingdom Initials: H A, Nationality: United Kingdom, Rank: Lieutenant, Extra Info: Son Of James And Ellen O'Sullivan (nee Flanrahan), Of 84, Brook Green, Hammersmith, London., Regiment: Royal Garrison Artillery, Unit Text: 41st Siege Bty., Casualty Type: Commonwealth War Dead, Grave Reference: V. G. 21., Cemetery: ECOIVRES MILITARY CEMETERY, MONT-ST

Joe Orton & Islington Library

	MAYHEM ON THE BOOKSHELVES
‘Libraries might as well not exist; they’ve got endless shelves for rubbish and hardly any space for good books.’ Orton, 1967. Orton and Halliwell first came to the public attention not as writers but through an elaborate and extended prank played out at their local library, altering book covers and adding new blurbs to dust jackets. Incensed at the poor choice of books at Essex Road, their local library, they began stealing books. These were smuggled out, dust jackets altered, new blurbs written on inside flaps and then surreptitiously returned. They had been suspected for some time and extra staff had been drafted to catch the culprits, but with no success. They were eventually caught by the careful detective work of Sydney Porrett, a senior clerk with Islington Council. A letter was sent to Halliwell asking him to remove an illegally parked car. Their typed reply matched typeface irregularities in the defaced books and the men were caught. While never openly admitting the reasons for the prank, these acts of guerrilla artwork were an early indication of Orton’s desire to shock and provoke. His targets were the genteel middle classes, authority and defenders of ‘morality’, against whom much of Orton’s later written work would rail against. Orton’s family were not told he had been arrested and found out from a story in the Daily Mirror. Titled The Gorilla in the Roses, it was illustrated with the altered Collins Guide to Roses. William Orton had stayed up to read the paper and on reading the story ran upstairs to his wife with the exclamation ‘Our John’s been nicked!’.

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The smell of old books

A smell or odour is caused by volatile compounds which we perceive by the sense of olfaction. An odour of a book is a complex mixture of odorous volatiles, emitted from different materials from which books are made. Due to the different materials used to make books throughout history, there is no one characteristic odour of old books. A professional perfumer has evaluated seventy odorous volatiles emitted from books and described their smells as dusty, musty, mouldy, paper-like or dry.

The pleasant aromatic smell is due to aromatic compounds emitted mainly from papers made from ground wood which are characterised by their yellowish-brown colour. They emit vanilla-like, sweetly fragrant vanillin, aromatic anisol and benzaldehyde, with fruity almond-like odor. On the other hand, terpene compounds, deriving from rosin, which is used to make paper more impermeable to inks, contribute to the camphorous, oily and woody smell of books. A mushroom odour is caused by some other, intensely fragrant aliphatic alcohols.

A typical odour of ‘old book’ is thus determined mixture of fragrant volatiles and is not dominated by any single compound. Not all books smell the same.

smell of books

Investigating the Smell of Old Books

April 16, 2008, 7:53 am

By Brock Read

Researchers at Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde are studying the smell of old books to “sniff” out the chemical signs of aging.

Books are placed for 24 to 48 hours in a sealed chamber, where “material and compounds responsible for the odour from the books” will be extracted and analyzed, according to a university press release. Findings from the analysis will be used to determine the best practices for storing old books—and may also explain where that musty old-book smell comes from.

The study is being conducted by the university’s Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry in partnership with the British Library, on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.—Catherine Rampell

Rachel Whiteread - Books

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