I just received a used textbook from an Amazon reseller. It’s a large paperback book and in good physical shape, the spine isn’t even cracked, but as soon as I ripped the packaging open, I could smell the smoke.
It’s bad enough that holding the book for just 2 or 3 minutes transfers that nasty old, tarry dead cigarette smell to my hands, and it’s made the room where it’s sitting smell bad too.:mad:
There’s no way I can spend a semester trying to study from this thing as it is.
Someone please tell me you have some tried and tested method of dealing with this. If I didn’t have a test in a week, I’d send the book back and demand an exchange, because it’s purely disgusting. The book was advertised as being in excellent condition, and this certainly isn’t.
I have never tried this myself, but I’ve heard that you can get bad smell out of things by freezing them.
Put the book in the freezer for a day and a night - that should help a lot with the smell.
I would probably think you were some kind of oversensitive whacko if I hadn’t experienced the exact same thing. What is it with the stale smoke smell? I just through the book away.
Once upon a time, Dogzilla went to happy hour. At that happy hour, Dogzilla ordered mussels in white wine garlic sauce. That wasn’t the only sauce Dogzilla had, however, so she got pretty hammered and didn’t eat all her mussels. On the way home, the to-go box tipped over and dripped garlicy, musselly, white wine sauce in her car seats. No amount of steam cleaning or Febreze would remove that godawful fishy smell from the car. Dogzilla, btw, is also a smoker.
I bought a bag of charcoal briquettes, but cannot strongly enough recommend getting the kind that aren’t infused with lighter fluid. I dumped the bag out into a brown paper grocery store bag and rode around with the charcoal in my car for about a week. When I took it out again, presto! No more fishy smell, no more smoky smell – and I’ve been smoking in my car for about 15 years.
For a book, I would wrap it in a brown paper bag, which is porous. Dump some charcoal into a bigger paper bag and drop the bag-sheathed book into the bigger bag. Let it sit on top of the charcoal for about a week.
Let me know how that goes.
My other suggestion is coffee. You might try some really cheap ground coffee and pretty much do the same thing. Coffee does absorb odors, but I think charcoal works much better.
I may have to start trying this with library books. “Sorry, I have to renew this because I had to de-stink it before I could even start reading it.” Week 1: the Dogzilla treatment. Week 2: Read books.
I smell library books before I even check them out. I couldn’t enjoy reading one that smelled like that, ugh. Sorry, OP, I think paper might be too absorbent to de-smokify, but the charcoal thing is certainly worth a try.
If it were me, I’d ask the seller for an exchange or return, anyway. I’d just tell him that you have a test and can’t return the book until next week, which gives you time to get a new one to replace it.
Some people have had decent results with kitty litter as well as charcoal.
I feel for you, though. I bought my first house from my grandmother, and my grandfather had smoked in that house for at least 30 years, possibly 40. He was such a smoker that he’d sometimes have one cigarette burning in an ashtray in the kitchen, and he’d light up another cigarette in the bathroom. It took us ages to get the smoke smell out.
I’ve bought some items from eBay which obviously came from a smoking household. After a couple of times, I learned to read the descriptions more carefully. If it doesn’t say it was from a nonsmoking environment, I ask the seller a question.
I’d contact the seller and ask for a refund because the book is pretty much unusable. Or at least ask for a partial refund, and you keep the book, because the seller failed to disclose a nasty defect.
Didn’t we have a thread recently about getting…cat pee out of a book? Or something?
I seem to recall people telling the person to put the book in a zip-top bag with some baking soda, and shaking the bag every few hours to keep the book coated.
My husband recently bought a box of 1950s electronics magazines that had been in some old codger’s garage since… well… the 1950s. He got rid of 90% of the mustiness by laying them outside, open, on a sunny day and letting the sun and wind get at them for about eight hours.
