Lowly Worm Sniffy Book

Lowly Worm Sniffy Book by Richard Scarry, 1978.

Sniffy books or scratch-and-sniff books were a new development during the 1970s, and they remained popular through the mid-1980s, along with scratch-and-sniff stickers. This particular book features characters from Richard Scarry‘s Busytown series, especially Lowly Worm. The first part of the book has Lowly and his friend Huckle Cat looking at a sniffy book and teaching readers how to use the scratch-and-sniff parts of the picture.

The rest of the book takes readers through the four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. In each season, there are different objects and foods associated with the season for readers to scratch and sniff. In the spring, the characters smell violets and bananas that they eat at the circus.

During the summer, there are lemons for making lemonade and chocolate ice cream sticks that they eat at the beach.

During the fall, there are apples and pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.

The winter parts focus on Christmas, with pine-scented Christmas trees and gingerbread pigs.

My Reaction

Sniffy books and stickers were common features of my early childhood in the 1980s. I think they still exist, although I don’t know if they’re as popular in the 21st century as they were back when they were relatively new developments. This particular sniffy book was a favorite of mine and my brother when we were little kids.

One of the interesting things about finding some of these older sniffy books decades later is seeing which of the scratch-and-sniff patches have held up over the years. They do wear out over the time, especially the ones that have been scratched more than others, meaning that favorite scent patches will wear out faster. Milder scents are also harder to detect years later than the ones that were always strong. In our old copy of this book, I can’t smell the lemon, chocolate ice cream, pumpkin pie, or gingerbread any more, but the violet, banana, apple, and pine are still fine. I think those scents were always the strongest.