If There Ever Was
A Book of Extinct and Impossible Smells

If There Ever Was: A Book of Extinct and Impossible Smells by Robert Blackson (Hardback) (ISBN: 9780955747809)

This is a scratch and sniff book of 14 extinct and impossible smells including the smell of the sun, communism, and extinct flowers. The book accompanies the exhibition of the same name curated by Reg Vardy Gallery (April - June 2008) and involved a collaboration with 11 fragrance designers and organisations such as NASA and International Flavors and Fragrances.

In his book of essays entitled, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, the physician Lewis Thomas wrote, 'The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking itself.' And it is with this appreciation of smell as comparable to thought and interpretation that the exhibition If There Ever Was considers scent as integral to the perception of abstraction and representation.

Scent is the essence of physical presence and lends proof to our surroundings. Contrastingly, the 14 scents re-created for If There Ever Was are inspired by absence. Like a cabinet of intangible curiosities, their forms are drawn from disparate stories throughout history for which few, if any, objects remain.

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