Join author and historian Will Tullett for an entertaining and interactive evening about the history of smells.

Take a journey through the weird and wonderful history of smells with historian Will Tullett, who has appeared on the BBC and in The Guardian. He will talk about his book, Sniff: A History of Smells, and the audience will be given scent strips, enabling them to smell along. It's going to be an unforgettable sensory experience!

Date: Thursday, 29 October

Time: 7-8.30pm

Tickets: £7

Venue: The Grove Bookshop, 10 The Grove, Ilkley, LS29 9EG

Tickets can be purchased in the shop or here via Eventbrite.

Refreshments will be served.

Refunds available, minus the Eventbrite fee, up to 3 days before the event.

Our Guest

Will Tullett is a senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of York. He is the author of Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense, and Smell and the Past: Noses, Archives, Narratives.

About the book:

Sniff: A History of Smells

Across vast periods of time and around the globe, smell has been central to human life. From the incense burned in medieval religious rituals to the use of modern sniffer dogs, smells have been central to our sense of identity, our ability to build communities, and, perhaps less positively, to mark those deemed unwelcome within them. Our sense of smell brings us the pleasure of good food, wine, and perfume, but it also warns us of dangerous fire, gas, and rot.

What did the past smell like? Why does our own world smell the way it does?

Moving through key locations, from libraries to forests, churches to hospitals, Will Tullett explores the peculiar history of smell. We smell witchcraft and murder, fin de siècle Parisian theatres, and cinemas in 1960s New York. What emerges is not just a history of smells, but biographies of the many noses that have sniffed them.

Praise for Sniff: A History of Smells:

“Tullett invites us to follow our noses into history, discovering the fascinating stories behind smells past and present. This is a stunning book full of surprises and revelations―and always alive to the politics of scents and stinks across history and today.” (Catherine Clarke, author of A History of England in 25 Poems)

“Sniff explores sensory landscapes, evoking newspaper ink, old books, and the chemical tang of new cars. This profound, sweeping history reveals how powerful scents have defined human experiences.” (Emily Cockayne, author of Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters)

“A deeply researched, revelatory and hugely entertaining sensory odyssey. Sniff hopscotches nimbly across centuries and continents to take us to some wonderful and terrifying places―ancient Rome, medieval China, the Shakespearian stage, the Victorian city, the trenches of the Great War, a modern funeral home―and reveals the myriad ways that smells evoke danger, pleasure, memories, places, bodies, in fact are the very stuff of life. Brilliant.” (David Hendy, author of Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening)

Description supplied by the event organiser.