biblichor (BIB-li-khor) - n., the smell of old books.
That dusty, faintly musty odor of a well-stocked library or ancient used book store. To a bibliophile, it is a comforting smell -- and yes, that would be me. Apparently coined on the model of one of my favorite words, petrichor, the smell of the earth during the first rain in a long time, a fragrance familiar to anyone who has lived in a desert, only instead of Greek petros, earth/rock, it's biblos, book, that is stemmed onto ichor, the fluid the Greek gods circulated instead of blood. I learned about the word because Powell's Bookstore has developed and sells a perfume of that scent.
---L.
That dusty, faintly musty odor of a well-stocked library or ancient used book store. To a bibliophile, it is a comforting smell -- and yes, that would be me. Apparently coined on the model of one of my favorite words, petrichor, the smell of the earth during the first rain in a long time, a fragrance familiar to anyone who has lived in a desert, only instead of Greek petros, earth/rock, it's biblos, book, that is stemmed onto ichor, the fluid the Greek gods circulated instead of blood. I learned about the word because Powell's Bookstore has developed and sells a perfume of that scent.
---L.