Smelling 300,000 Books

“It’s a daring idea,” says David Senior, a MoMA bibliographer and friend, “because some of our books smell really bad.””

A woman in New York is smelling all 300,000 books in the MoMA library and writing ab0ut it in pencil in an accounting ledger.

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Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.

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