Without a doubt, you’re reading this from a screen, and probably the only thing you’re smelling is your morning coffee. But now chemists have quantified and explained that long-coveted “old book smell,” for better or worse… Some old books, like 19th-century French writer Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame, are bound in human skin (ew). Good news if you’d prefer to stick to the scanned: HathiTrust, the scannable digital library, has won the court case permitting the agency to continue uploading books for those who cannot read them in person.
Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez has scored the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Sound of Things Falling (translated by Anne McLean, who snagged 25 percent of the award’s cash prize!). The newest United States Poet Laureate has been announced: Charles Wright, Pulitzer Prize winner and translator of Italian writer Eugenio Montale, will preside over the country’s most eminent poetic spot.