Like a lot of graduate students in the 1980s and 1990s, myself included, Sarah Mentock haunted yard sales and garage sales in hope of finding a signed Magna Carta or a Catcher in the Rye—okay, even a signed Updike. She told Washington Post reporter Ashley Stimpson for a July 24, 2024 story published on-line that, when she spotted at one such sale a copy of a 14th-century Scottish epic poem, “The Lord of the Isles,” an exemplar that was bound handsomely in multi-color cloth, she said to herself, “I [have] to have it . . . It was just so beautiful.” Standing proud-ly on her bookshelves at home for three decades, the book’s spine featured a “vivid green sliver.” She didn’t think much of it until she encountered in 2022 the so-called Poison Book Project housed at the University of Delaware. Its chemical engineers, historians and rare book special-ists had tasked themselves with trying first to find and ultimately to remove from circulation, all of the books published during the heyday of the Victorian era that might contain or that did con-tain dangerous toxins including mercury, chromium, lead and especially arsenic.
For long, booksellers and bibliophiles have told themselves and others that the vibrant green cloth bindings of that era were poisonous (or not). Stay away (or don’t bother). Don gloves (get serious). Don’t sell ‘em (yeah, keep ‘em). Don’t touch ‘em (wussy). Sarah learned that The Poi-son Book Project is housed in the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library at the University of Delaware and that its officials were informing the public that “heavy metals” and dangerous “amines” were dangerous to human and environment alike, especially the bindings featuring the more vivid covers such as “emerald green,” “non-arsenical chrome yellow” and a mixture of “Prussian blue” tones. To that time, at least 100 previously circulating rare books were proved to contain such toxic dyes.
Fairly alarmed, Mentock wrapped up her Scottish poetry book carefully and shipped it to the Poison Book Project. She heard back shortly thereafter that each of the book’s colors belied poi-son: the red=mercury; the blue=lead; the pretty green=arsenic. In fact, said the Project in a con-gratulatory letter sent to her, “you have the dubious honor of sending us the most toxic book yet” (Stimpson). The Poison Book Project was launched after a rare book specialist and conser-vator elsewhere, Melissa Tedone, began to suspect that a book she’d repaired for a 2019 exhibi-tion devoted to Victorian-era aquariums, Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste, featuring a bright green binding, was rife with the same flaking arsenic that flaked away from Victorian-era wallpaper about which she’d been reading. And it was. The Project continues to compile a rich and well researched repository of poisonous elements and the books that carry them.
Books Will Speak Plain—and sometimes kill you.
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