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I received a letter from a reader who wanted to know how to rid a book of odor. Even the most careful buying practices and storage cannot guarantee you will never have a book with an unpleasant odor. Solutions to this problem are varied and personal. Ask ten booksellers how they handle this problem and you'll get ten answers. In order to see what our readers recommend, I posted a plea on our forum for help and got some great responses.
Bookworm was the first to reply with links to earlier discussions on the forum board. Among the agents suggested there were baking soda, sheets of fabric softener nestled between pages, cat litter, Dr. School's odor eaters, charcoal, time, bright sunlight, microwaving or freezing the book. Justonce suggested a product called All Revitalizer Cloths that are activated by heating in a microwave and wiping the book. The process is swift since the cloths are damp; Justonce swears that 4 minutes was all it took to "sweeten" a book.
My own contribution is a bit more ghoulish. I'd been discussing smells in books with some other booksellers and friends. One of the party had ties to a funeral parlor and suggested we use embalming deodorizer. Since I'd never seen such a product on the hardware store shelf, I searched the Internet. Google.com came up with a product called Smelleze on a site called no-odor.com. According to the description, the product is environmentally safe and capable of neutralizing large areas of putrid odors. The company states: "Smelleze(TM) is negatively charged whereas body and embalming fluid odors ride on positively charged particles" thereby making it safe for chemically sensitive people to use.
Ok, but how does it do fighting off the smell of mildew and tobacco?
I sent for the product. It was a fine brown powder that had no smell of its own. The directions were simple enough: sprinkle on the body.
I chose to employ the method I used when trying baking soda and kitty litter. I poured the smelleze in the bottom of a plastic bin and placed the book on a rack directly above it. I closed the lid and checked the next day. It worked.
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