Ah, lovely serendipity abounds!  Reading about nose blindness led to researching Tycho Brahe’s golden nose and wound up exposing a lot about toilet paper.  “What Is Nose Blindness and How Can It Affect You?,” a Healthline article describes how smells become less noticeable over time.  It’s “a temporary, naturally occurring adaptation of your body that leads to an inability to detect or distinguish common scents in your surroundings …. It’s important to note that nose blindness is different from anosmia, a condition in which your overall sense of smell is greatly reduced or even lost.”  They noted that offensive odors stimulate nose blindness and cited a Nature.com article on “olfactory habituation” that states that “Habituation is a filter that optimizes the processing of information by our brain in all sensory modalities. It results in an unconscious reduced responsiveness to continuous or repetitive stimulation.”  

            The famous Roman baths, which contained communal public toilets that were quite fragrant, especially since visitors used a communal tesorium, a hunk of sponge or cloth on the end of a stick.  “All the Ways We’ve Wiped: The History of Toilet Paper and What Came Before,” a History.com article by Crystal Ponti, pointed out that archeologists have discovered a 2,000-year-old Chinese salaka, a “hygiene stick” like a tesorium, but by 589 CE the Chinese recorded the first historical use of paper for that purpose.  But “in the Western world, modern commercially available toilet paper didn’t originate until 1857, when Joseph Gayetty of New York marketed a ‘Medicated Paper, for the Water-Closet,’ sold in packages of 500 sheets for 50 cents.”  Toiletpaperhsitory.net article on Gayetty reported that his product was advertised to help hemorrhoid sufferers but was “a commercial disaster.”  A contributing factor was that “splinter-free” toilet paper wasn’t advertised until the 1930s.

A Mental Floss story, “Toilet Paper History: How America Convinced the World to Wipe,” pointed out that until the 20^th century Americans preferred leaves, moss and the Sears catalog over Gayetty’s stiff, hemp-based and costly product, but in 1890 the Scott brothers, Clarence and Irving, began selling toilet paper on a roll but “it was still an uphill battle to get the public to openly buy the product, largely because Americans remained embarrassed by bodily functions. In fact, the Scott brothers were so ashamed of the nature of their work that they didn’t take proper credit for their innovation until 1902.”  Then indoor plumbing became more affordable and “people required a product that could be flushed away with minimal damage to the pipes.” Nonetheless, everything related to that natural biological function remained taboo until 1928 when the Hoberg Paper Company introduced a new brand, Charmin, whose advertising depicted a beautiful woman and focused on softness and femininity instead of the product’s purpose.  Then they sold Charmin in economy-sized four-packs, and “decades later the dainty ladies were replaced with babies and bear cubs,” that are still seen today. 

This leads to a long-festering debate: should toilet paper drape over or under the rolls.  The original U.S. patent showed the paper coming over the top, and polls show most Americans prefer that, too.  It was 74% to 26% in a Cottenelle survey, but many cat owners prefer under to inhibit feline unspoolling.  USAToday takes it further in “The Scientific Answer to the Over-Under Toilet Paper Debate.”  They state that the over approach promotes usability (“it’s easier to rip off a square”) and cleanliness (“When you dispense toilet paper with the under method, as you attempt to pull the toilet paper off the roll, you usually have to get your hand a bit closer to the existing roll which results in a much higher likelihood of you touching the unused toilet paper … According to one study, toilet tissue dispensers already have 150 times more bacteria than the seats themselves. Most of these bacteria are not harmful as long as you wash your hands, but studies show people fail to wash their hands correctly 97 percent of the time.”  Then there’s the toilet plume, the aerosol rises up to 15 feet in the air from your toilet when you flush.

            Those Roman public toilets might have odiferous, but at least they were plentiful.  Not so in the U.S., which has only eight public toilets per 100,000 people, on par with Botswana.  Iceland’s the world leader with 56 per 100,000.  “The Struggle to Find a Public Toilet, a Smithsonian article by Adina Soloman, notes that this “is a particular problem for people who are unhoused.”  The numbers of unsheltered Americans grows every year, each needs to relieve themselves up to eight times daily, but the number of free public restrooms is declining.

This is very true here in the Golden Heart City where the public library restrooms are a rare exception.  Years ago I gave lectures to my library colleagues about this subject titled “Potty Talk: What They Didn’t Teach in Library School” in which I related how we reduced vandalism and other issues in our local library restrooms 85% by designing them to inhibit full-body bathing, graffiti, drug dealing, sleeping in the stalls, etc.  I also mentioned the then-new Portland Loos created by the Portland City Commission.  The Portlandloo.com sites says “With its rounded anti-graffiti wall panels, open grating, easy-to-clean coating, and interchangeable building components, it’s the Swiss army knife of restrooms.”  Their Loos can be cleaned with a hose, users’ feet and heads can been seen from the outside, and it’s inexpensive to operate.  However, it does cost $100,000, but as more places close their restrooms to the public, even apart from the humanity of providing this service, it reduces many hidden costs of keeping the community sanitary.  As for upkeep, Philadelphia needed only two workers to maintain the 20 Portland Loos they installed after a serious outbreak of fecal-transmitted hepatitis-A.  With a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation or similar source, installing a single Portland Loo in downtown Fairbanks seems affordable, manageable, and humane.  

            The holiday gift-giving season is approaching, and something to consider are the swarm of library and bookstore scented candles, air fresheners, and personal fragrances that abound online. Etsy offers such enhancers as “Vintage Bookstore,” Edinburgh Library,” “Smells Like Just One More Chapter,” and “Stepping into Your Favorite Bookstore.”  But what are libraries and bookshops fragrant of?  In Perfumeson.com’s article, “What Does Library Fragrance Smell Like? Exploring the Scent of Books and Knowledge,” Gillian Page wrote “Library fragrance smells like a combination of old paper, leather bindings, and a touch of wood polish.”  She also related how real libraries smell: public libraries (“a distinct smell due to the large number of visitors and the materials checked out. May have a smell of cleaning products due to the need for frequent cleaning”), as opposed to academic libraries (“a smell of paper and ink due to the large amount of printed materials” and “a chemical smell due to the use of preservation and conservation methods for rare and fragile”).  Working librarians will tell you the aromas are much more complex and nuanced. 

Smelling wasn’t a big concern of the pioneering Danish 16^th century astronomer Tycho Brahe, a hunk of whose nose was cut off by his third cousin in a duel over a drunken argument over who was the best mathematician.  They reconciled eventually and Tycho thereafter wore a brass nose secured with glue, except on special occasions when he wore one of gold or silver.  Born to an illustrious noble family, graduating from college at fourteen and being fascinated by astronomy, astrology, and alchemy, he quickly earned a European-wide reputation in those fields.  He drew up the Danish king’s astrological charts, and the king presented him with an island and the funds to build his dream castle-cum-observatory-cum alchemy lab, Uraniborg, complete with 100 assistants and 16 furnaces.

Tycho was known for the accuracy of his astronomical observations that in the pre-telescope 1500s required good eyesight and year-round nightly observations.  As Peter Mannion noted in “Galileo and 400 Years of Telescopic Astronomy,” Tycho’s “unprecedented research program both turned astronomy into the first modern science and also helped launch the Scientific Revolution.”  That’s how in 1572 he discovered the first recorded super nova, and coined the term in his book, “De nova stella.”  The year before he married for love a Lutheran minister’s daughter, which alienated his family, royal society, the clergy, and the new Danish king.  They had a morganatic marriage: after living openly as a couple for three years they were legally wed, but their children couldn’t share his name, title, or lands.  So, he left Denmark and died at age 54 from a burst bladder after a banquet in Prague where he really needed to pee but refused to leave the table since he feared being impolite.  When his body was autopsied in the 1990s, gold plate was found covering his inner organs; he used gold-plated utensils to eat, and inhaled gold fumes during alchemy experiments.  It’s untrue that his pet moose died from falling downstairs after drinking ale; it was an elk.  As Dustin Hoffman said, “Life stinks, but that doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy it.