L’odeur de l’hiver
Year: 2014
Author/artist: Robbin Ami Silverberg (*1958)
Publisher: Dobbin Books
Cover of L'odeur de l'hiver
‘There remains to us some vestige of the haptic experience!’ Robbin Ami Silverberg remarked when asked about the tactile life of the artist’s book in the digital age. Few works embody that conviction more completely than L’odeur de l’hiver, a work that resists passive viewing and instead asks to be touched, heard, unfolded and even smelled.
Monuments of memory
Memory (a key theme in Silverberg’s body of work) orientates the work in a Proustian fashion. In conversation, Silverberg spoke of her desire to recreate her childhood winters in Montréal, and more specifically, the peculiar smell of cold. It is around this scent that this work is orientated. Most remarkable is the inclusion of an accompanying perfume vial, created in collaboration with Silverberg’s neighbouring perfumers at MCMC Fragrances. The perfume almost functions as parallel readable aspect of the book: throughout the pages, the ingredients of the perfume’s recipe appear disassembled into isolated words, scattered cryptographically through the volume before gradually accumulating meaning at its centre. There, overlaying photographs of snow and shadows, that were taken by the artist at Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Salt Lake, Utah, the formula repeats itself insistently.
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L’odeur de l’hiver, perfume vial in the cassette
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L’odeur de l’hiver, tabs of paper on page 7
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L’odeur de l’hiver, perfume recipe
Creating the scent
The handwritten recipe records the trial-and-error process of perfume making, displaying the interplay between Silverberg and perfumer Anne Serrano-McClain. Though long based in New York, Silverberg insists that Montréal winters possess a uniquely identifiable scent, distinct from that of other colder places. However, the perfumer, a California-native, offered her own reflections that took the process in a different direction: a Pacific-Coast winter is, quite literally, miles from a Montréal winter. When Silverberg first smelled the perfume, it was bloomy and fresh: the perfumer had based the scent on her own memories of winter months. Following a number of iterations, the final fragrance displayed a layered geography, with brighter, fleeting Californian top notes, while Montréal remained the colder and more enduring base. The perfume was crafted only after Silverberg had already commenced the book. Ultimately, the perfume resolved the book rather than shaped it: the recipe tied the pages, photographs and shadows together with its chemical traces.
Introspective layers
L’odeur de l’hiver
The physical structure of the book is equally sophisticated. Silverberg created the sheets at Dobbin Mill, her own papermaking studio in the heart of Brooklyn, established in 1989. The papers share the same translucent density; however, some leaves are laminated together and embedded with white and deep-purple silks. The pages emit a brittle crackling when turned, recalling the sound of footsteps in the snow. The embedded silks recall deep purple and blue shadows cast on the show, as seen in the photographs of the central codex. This middle section departs materially from the outer sections. The leaves are, again, translucent, but the interposed photographs bind together the outer sections and their silks and chemical traces. The change in scale and paper thickness within this middle section interrupts the rhythm of the volume, creating a sensation of moving inward, almost like the spiral movement of Spiral Jetty itself.
Reading the unreadable
The concluding text, printed on the reverse of the final leaf, is a whimsical poem describing a woman travelling with phantom books from the North Pole. It reads like a playful meditation on the chemistry that permeates the rest of the work. L’odeur de l’hiver thus becomes a true artist’s book of cold: a work that renders the ineffable readable through all the senses. After all, the absence of a running narrative encourages to read otherwise.
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L’odeur de l’hiver, poem
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L’odeur de l’hiver, detail of the poem
This multidimensional reading, or the ‘choreography of the read,’ as Silverberg calls it, stems from her involvement with installation art and her background as a sculptor. With paper as her preferred material, she constructs the act of reading as a bodily and multisensory experience. The reader must manipulate fragile leaves, decipher fragmented language and listen to the crackle of paper in order to complete the work. Silverberg’s books therefore become increasingly relational: the work can only be understood through the reader’s senses and their mind. Reading through the translucent papers, as she describes it, becomes an act of reading both horizontally and vertically.
L’odeur de l’hiver, colophon
An additional layer of originality lies in the work’s highly variable editions. As is often the case in Silverberg’s practice, no two copies are entirely identical. Because the papers are handmade at Dobbin Mill and each copy is individually assembled, variations occur in translucency, embedded silks, and placement of the tabs of paper. Particularly notable is the linguistic variation across the copies: while all other nine copies were produced in English under the title Smell of Winter, Silverberg produced a unique French copy upon the request of the Anny Antoine – Louis Koopman collection.
Bibliographical description
Description: L’odeur de l’hiver / Robbin Ami Silverberg. - New York : Dobbin Books, 2014. - 32 p. ; 37 × 34 cm.
Printer: Dobbin Books
Edition: 10 copies with variations, made with archival inkjet print on handmade Dobbin Mill paper with silk inlays.
This copy: Number 7 of 10 (unique French variation)
Note: Includes a bottle containing the handcrafted ‘Neige’ fragrance, specially created for this edition by Anne Serrano-McClain, MCMC Fragrances. Signed by the artist.
Shelfmark: KW KOOPM P10094
References
- The Activated Page: Handmake Paper and the Artist’s Book. (Jae Jennifer Rossman, ed.), New Haven CT, the jenny-press, 2007.
- Paul van Capelleveen, ‘Dobbin Books, Robbin Ami Silverberg’ in Artists & Others: The Imaginative French Book in the 21st Century. Koopman Collection, National Library of the Netherlands. Nijmegen, Vantilt Publishers, 2016, pp. 154–155.
- Creative Research: The Artist’s Books of Veronika Schäpers, Robbin Ami Silverberg and Julie Chen. Johannesburg, Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts, 2022.
- Documentatie voor de uitgave Artists & Others – deel 2. Den Haag, 2015. [Bevat e-mails van Robbin Ami Silverberg]
- Carol Naggar, ‘Material and Ideas: Robbin Ami Silverberg’ in Hand Papermaking vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 1998), pp. 9–15.
- ‘Robbin Ami Silverberg’ [artist's website: https://www.robbinamisilverberg.com/]
- Robbin Ami Silverberg, e-mail naar Paul van Capelleveen, 19 mei 2026.
- Robbin Ami Silverberg, ‘Political Paper’ in Hand Papermaking vol. 19, No. 1 (zomer 2004), pp. 16–19.
- Robbin Ami Silverberg, Thirty Years Thirty Books: Read Me. Like a Book. New York, Pratt Institute Libraries, 2020.
