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…
Luca Turin's next book, The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell, will be published in the UK next year by Faber & Faber. Those of you who have read Chandler Burr's Emperor of Scent, which described Turin's efforts to unlock the mystery of how smell works, are already familiar with the basics of the controversy between shape and vibration theorists (for background, see the links provided in my interview with Luca Turin). Turin's book will focus on the history of this controversy and pay homage to those before him who “got it right”, although as he acknowledges, the jury is still out on the matter…
Thank you to Natalie and Anya for finding this article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Mandy Aftel, whose next book, Scents and Sensibilities, is due out this month.
There were two perfume-related articles in the Sunday New York Times Magazine yesterday. The first, by Chandler Burr, explores attitudes towards perfume in Japan, "a culture whose relationship to fragrance is more ambivalent than perhaps any other on the planet."
The second article is about the cookbook Aroma: The Magic of Essential Oils in Food & Fragrance, released last year by perfumer Mandy Aftel of Aftelier and chef Daniel Patterson:
...the two connect in their longing to marry scent and taste. ''There was no template for cooking with essential oils,'' Patterson says. So they decided to create one. First came chilled carrot soup, with fresh ginger and a drop of ginger essential oil. That led to blood orange sorbet; mojitos with spearmint oil; crab salad with coriander oil; and white chocolate with sweet fennel and the essence of tarragon, which pushed the boundaries of chocolate as a comfort food. ''I remember being knocked out by how they just transformed things,'' he says.
The article includes three recipes.
Thames & Hudson have published a new biography, titled The World of Coco Chanel -- Friends, Fashion, Fame. The book was written by Edmonde Charles-Roux, Chanel's official biographer and close friend, and includes over 600 illustrations. You can read a review in the Pretoria News, the New Statesman, or the Telegraph (none of these three links are still active, sorry!).