The downtown Goodwill has been good to me. Over the past year alone, it has yielded a bottle of vintage Guerlain Mitsouko Parfum de Toilette, a pair of midcentury Carlo of Hollywood watercolors, and a taxidermied pheasant (now in my office and nicknamed “Fester” by the finance department). Two weeks ago, I really hit the jackpot: copy number 172 of Visionaire No. 42, Scent.1
Of course, I had no idea what it was when I found it. Sitting on Goodwill’s perfume shelf next to bottles of Prince Matchabelli Wind Song, Liz Claiborne Realities, and a few other fragrances I found easy to pass by was a rectangular, white padded-vinyl box with nearly inscrutable lettering stamped into the vinyl. I did, though, recognize “IFF” stamped at the top…