First…we believe everyone should be honest.  If your books and magazines are from a smoker’s home, please be aware that the books and magazines now have smoky smell.   A smoker may not mind.  But your non-smoking buddies will mind.   We opened the box and WHOA!!!   When the smell rushed out, we felt like we had just smoked a pack ourselves.

So, we asked for everyone for advice and nearly tried them all.  Here were the suggestions and results:

• Put magazines in a closed box with newsprint.  Put the box in the sun and let it sit – didn’t try
   
• Put magazines in a closed box with charcoal.  Put the box in the sun and let it sit – didn’t try  (note…it was also suggested that you put the box in the trunk of your car and drive it around in the heat.  In a TX summer this would work, but in other climates, it may not…)
   
• Sprinkle baking soda between the pages and let it sit – GooseRating: 2 of 10 happy honks
  The baking soda did absorb some smell but quickly became saturated.   We tried to shake the baking soda from the pages and we ended up with a pile of stinky soda.   We did send it down the drain, hoping that it would make the sink drain smell nice…instead it made it smell smoky.  Ultimately, it was next to impossible to get all the baking soda off the pages.  There was some static on some glossy pages so we had powder constantly sticking.  YUCKY YUCKY.    No matter how much we used, it never removed all the stink.
   
• Put Bounce dryer sheets between the pages, put the mags in a box and let it sit – GooseRating: 8 of 10 happy honks
  We had many mags so we were unable to put a bounce sheet between each page.  We put 3 sheets in the magazine and a sheet between magazines.   Then we put all of it in a box and let it sit for > 2 mos.   This method has promise.  85% of the smell went away.
   
• Put magazines in a box with a Renuzit Odor absorber – GooseRating: 7 of 10 happy honks
  Ok, we admit that this helped a lot, but only 90% of the smell went away.   So why did we rate it lower than the Bounce?   Well, despite the fact that it’s cheaper than Bounce, it added the stink of “odor absorber”.   The Bounce didn’t add any stink…it only removed.

Ultimately, we must admit that none of the methods made the mags ok to live at our nest.   When you flip through the pages, a faint stinky comes out and makes us sneeze!!!   The Destinking did make it so that we could tolerate the mags long enough to scan them so that the smoky pages could be removed from our nest….