What follows is a very brief compilation of reading suggestions to get you through the cold, dark days of winter. Five handpicked books, warmly recommended to the budding perfume enthusiast who wishes to learn more about the object of their passion.
Category: novels
Some have argued it’s a classic of contemporary German literature, I’ll stick to the assertion that it’s a very rewarding read: Perfume by Patrick Süskind should be part of everyone’s collection indeed.
Patrick Süskind
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
available from various publishers. Penguin Books (UK) will issue a new pocket edition in January 2006…
The World of Perfume is the sort of book that covers walls in discount bookcenters: it shares the shelf with illustrated books about birds, guns, trains, and fishing equipment. I bought my copy almost a decade ago, and it's been a while since I last browsed through its pages. Time to revisit this forgotten gem, and to set aside some prejudices about affordable coffee-table books.
There is no definitive, universally accepted perfume classification. Various charts, tables, and diagrams have been circulating among fragrance manufacturers since the 1970s, and you’re probably familiar with Michael Edwards’ Fragrance Wheel, introduced back in 1992. The French, of course, have a classification of their own: it’s described at length in the bilingual booklet 
The French fin de siècle must have been an incredibly exciting era. Just think of the great technological progress of the 1880s: the decade that brought us synthetic perfumery, with fragrances like Houbigant’s Fougère Royale (1882) and Guerlain’s Jicky (1889). But they were also times of increasing pessimism: in French literature, a group of self-proclaimed Decadents turned their backs on the current known as Naturalism. With their harsh depictions of a civilization in decline, they reacted against the contemporary bourgeois ideal of eternal progress. Joris-Karl Huysmans, the most prominent member of the Decadent movement, uncovers the maladies of the late nineteenth century in his novel 
With the exception of a handful of bestselling novels, books about fragrance rarely appeal to audiences outside the perfume community, and seldom raise controversy among their readers. The opposite is true for