New York has been immortalized over and over again in literature — but never quite like this. The folks over at Good recently alerted us to the existence of a strange (and smelly) new children’s book, New York, Phew York: A Scratch-N-Sniff Adventure, which is, you guessed it, a scratch-n-sniff tour of New York City, brought to you by first time author Amber Jones.
“I work in Times Square and one day while I was walking to the train I got a delicious whiff of pizza. As I was was looking in the window at the pizza, deciding if I should buy a slice, I didn’t realise I was steeping in horse manure,” Jones told the Guardian . “I went to the corner to make sure I didn’t get any on my shoe and was engulfed by shish kebab smoke from a food cart. It’s then I thought ‘there should be a scratch-n-sniff guide of New York’. Wha-la! The idea was born.”
The book covers 19 neighborhoods and 30 smells, including Red Apple, Strawberry, Garbage, Pizza, Hot dogs, Sewer steam, Fish, Churros, Peanuts, Horse Manure, Shish-kabobs, Smoke, Bagels, Grass, Piragua Ice Cone, Pickles, Pastrami, and more. Traditional publishers refused to take the idea on, turned off by the cost of production and the idea that readers wouldn’t pay to sniff gross stuff, but Jones managed to raise enough money to self-publish via Kickstarter, and you can now pre-order the book and read more over at her website. What do you think? Would you like to smell your way through NYC from the comfort of your couch, or do you get enough of city smells in your daily life? Let us know in the comments!