Novelists have always known, maybe because their lives are so bound up in books.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote:

“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

For many people, the smell of books, in particular, is one of memory’s most powerful messengers, especially as the printed page gives way to the digital.

The aroma of paper and buckram in a West Texas county library where I worked as a teenager has stayed with me for decades, bringing back my youth with a Proustian punch whenever I catch a whiff of an old book.

Over the past year, a Columbia University preservation expert and a curator at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan have been engaged in an unusual poetic-scientific experiment in the little-visited olfactory wing of history, trying to pin down the powerful connection between smell and memory — in this case, collective memory.