People assume that I’m only kidding when I advocate the publication of a scratch-and-sniff version of Melville’s Moby Dick, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Proust’s Combray, or Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. Au contraire! I am ready and willing to develop olfactory editions of great literary works. Notice I say olfactory editions. Use of the low-brow scratch and sniff — or worse — scratch ‘n’ sniff — could not possibly advance my cause with academic publishers. And odorama will be forever linked to the glorious king of kitsch, John Waters, who has riffed on the idea of his own celebrity perfume, cleverly named Eau de Waters, “the smell of an obsessed film fanatic.”¹ Another earnestly eccentric social observer, Honoré de Balzac, came very close to coining odorama in his novel Père Goriot (1835). There characters fling “-orama“ wordplay across the table (corn-orama, soup-orama, health-orama, death-orama), while dining in one of French fiction’s smelliest boarding houses. Its sticky, rancid, musty, scullery-and-hospital reek, “charged by the catarrhal exhalations of every individual lodger living there,” certainly merits the term, along with a place of honor on an odorama sniff card.

There are loads of scratch-and-sniff books for children, and even for the dog who has everything (See Spot Smell). But the selection of fragrance-enhanced reading for grown-up humans remains slim. And buyer, beware. A search for adult olfactory literature will turn up some seedy stuff. Not campy, self-aware seedy; just boorish, irony-deficient seedy…

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