A note from the Ex Libris Odoratis designer: Portals is now available for preorder.

Portals is now available for preorder to the US, Canada, and the UK.

Conceived in early 2023, I envisioned an addition to our collection of zines, books, and ephemera that would lean into the mystery of scent. It wouldn’t analyze or explain, but live in the magic instead. More than that, I hoped the next Ex Libris Odoratis book would synthesize divergent voices.

So we’ve made an art book. The brief: three artists approach ten perfumes as conduits to the divine. Selected at random, each scent conjures false memories, enabling time travel, teleportation, and hyperphantasia — opening portals to imagined worlds.

The perfumes span the classics, the niche, and the indies. Beyond the artwork, prose, and poetry, there’s a Notes and Plates section, and a Perfumography.

Kashina has always struck me as someone committed to the mystery. A crate-digger of all things sensory, her missives on obscure fragrance, foodstuffs and vinyl records at @illicium.verum.nova feel like transmissions from a distant star. They burst with passion, vitality, and unreality… Her writing features in Portals alongside my own, as well as ink and watercolor paintings by Elizabeth Doering, an artist and colorist from the Pacific Northwest. Elizabeth’s vivid forms become subtle meditations on the body, emotions, and the subconscious.

I won’t say much about my own writing — you’ll just have to read it for yourself. I will say that it responds as much to Kashina’s and Elizabeth’s works as the individual perfumes, and has plumbed the depths.

Writing and painting by feeling will take you into your deepest dreams. It turns out, perfume is a gilded key to the most labyrinthine of mind palaces. This is the proof.

Books begin shipping in November. Your early support helps our small imprint plan production, and is deeply appreciated.

In dreams,

Noele, ELO Designer/Writer