You Can Smell Like Old Books With This New Perfume

Finally you can stop rubbing old books on yourself before you go out on the town. Because that is absolutely something people do...right? With Dead Writers, the new perfume line from Sweet Tea Apothecary, you can smell like old books and great literature anytime you want.

Sweet Tea Apothecary is the brainchild of JT Siems, a self-described literary fan girl and perfume mixer based in Seattle. Siems' first perfumes starred her favorite heroes from history, such as Marie Antoinette and Henry VIII. But now Siems and her smells have drifted into the fiction section of the library.

There are five Dead Writers scents to choose from, including the flagship fragrance Dead Writers. It smells of black tea, musk, and tobacco. Obviously, the sweet apothecary enjoys very manly literature.

But that's not all she wrote...or smelled. Sweet Apothecary is also offering Jack Kerouac fans Dharma Bums, which smells like coffee and opium. (There is no On the Road perfume inspired by car fumes and dead raccoon.) Pemberly features florals from the gardens of the Derbyshire estate — Jane Austen's inspiration for Pemberly in Pride and Prejudice. And Lenore: An Edgar Allen Poe Inspired Perfume smells like a bleeding, beating heart hidden underneath the floorboards. Ahem, I mean, like dried roses and incense.

Siems, Sweet Apothecary's founder and master nose, explained how she got started in a post for the Ethos Review :

When I visited the Grand Trianon in Versailles, the smell of the fields, the flowers, the streams, the wildlife in conjunction with the idyllic architecture began to paint a portrait in my mind of Marie Antoinette, of what she loved and what she would have worn. It was from this experience that I first got the idea to mix mediums. I looked at it as both a fangirl and as an intellectual exercise: can a scent recreate a person or a lifestyle?

Turns out she can. And at $80 an ounce, makes a pretty nice living at it. Here's hoping the next book she reads is not Upton Sinclair's The Jungle .