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.
Like most books in this genre, The World of Perfume is meant to browse through…
Suppose you want it all: a comprehensive read on the history of perfume, biographies on the greatest noses of the past, insights in the creation of fragrances and fragrance bottles, a smart guide with addresses and perfume classifications, and perhaps even some tips on how to create your own fragrance wardrobe. Is there a single book that covers all these things exhaustively? The answer is no. But The Book of Perfume by Elisabeth Barillé and Catherine Laroze comes very close…
Scents of Time, subtitled Perfume From Ancient Egypt to the 21st Century, is a gift set that was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1999. An outer box sleeve opens to reveal the book along with eight perfume minatures developed by Givaudan to illustrate the “most influential scents in history”: frankincense, rose, sandalwood jasmine, orange blossom, spice, eau de cologne, millefleurs, and sportif.
The text provides a nicely illustrated survey of perfume history. A short introductory chapter introduces the major scent families, along with some basic production techniques and perfume terminology…
Elisabeth Barille’s Guerlain is a thin volume, with 15 pages of text and about 50 pages of photographs. The text provides background on the history of the Guerlain family and their illustrious perfume house, but a die-hard perfume fanatic may find it too brief and general to be of much interest…
Another very interesting perfume article (link no longer working, sorry) discovered by Karen, this one from the Scotsman. It seems that Italian archaeologists have uncovered a 4,000 year old perfumery on a hillside in Cyprus, and used fragments from clay bottles to reconstruct some of the fragrances made there. From another article on the same subject (link no longer working) in Reuters:
And, archaeologists have discovered, modern preferences are not too different from those of 4,000 years ago.
“I smelt this one and immediately thought, Pino Silvestre!” said Belgiorno…