Dead Writers

A book gives something up when it is read.

Hemingway, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Poe. An old library chair, a stack of yellowed copies, and the particular staleness paper takes on once it has been handled long enough. Made by hand in Seattle in small batches.

Black tea carries it, dry and tannic. Clove sharpens that. Tobacco and vetiver do the paper: dusty, faintly bitter, nothing polished about either of them. Heliotrope and vanilla warm the room the paper is sitting in, and a vegan musk keeps the whole thing low. Somewhere in it a kettle has just gone on.

Immortal Perfumes is a one-person house in Seattle, run since 2012 by JT Siems, who writes every formula and makes every bottle by hand in small batches. The subjects come from books and from history: writers, artists, historical figures. A vampire story that beat Dracula to print by twenty-six years. A Bavarian king's midnight banquets. The smell left on a magician's own papers.

An archive, not a department store counter, and it is run that way. Email is answered and orders are packed by the same person who blends them. The formulas are jojoba and alcohol, essential oils and aromachemicals, and the synthetics in them get a long plain-language defence on the house's own site instead of being kept out of sight. Nothing in the line is made from an animal, and every formula is original.