Last week, Dear Reader, I introduced you to a joint project between the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library and the University of Delaware: the Poison Book Project. Winterthur officials such Rosie Grayburn and Melissa Tedone were led to flag 19th-century books for traces of dangerous chemicals and poisons in the pigments used to dye the bookcloths. They found dangerous levels of arsenic in at least 100 examples of books bound in “Paris Emerald Green,” and other rare book collections, museums and bookshops have done same. When they dry, the dye flakes and turns to dust, thus contaminating nearby surfaces not to say also eyes, ears, noses and throats. Such books have been removed from circulation.
One expects to find dangerous ideas in certain books, whether the Old Testament, Das Kapital or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but one expects not, hopes not, to find lead, arsenic, chromium, black mold and mercury, too. An official from the Library Company of Philadelphia who was interviewed by Justin Brower of National Geographic reported that 28 of their rarest books were found to be contaminated and dangerous.
All manner of new and old technologies were deployed in the quest to find danger in old books. A microscope was used to detect flaking fragments of the starch dyed dark green that had been used to strengthen the common bookcloths of the 19th century. One of the Winterthur Museum’s laboratory scientists, Dr. Rosie Grayburn, used the more powerful x-ray fluorescence spectrometer on same only to find not just arsenic but also dangerous levels of copper.
These cheap bookcloth replacements for traditional leather bindings surged into popularity in France in the 1840s, and the vivid “Paris Emerald Green” was quite favored for several decades. By then, however, says Marisa Sloan in a 2022 article for Discover, “tens of thousands of books were bound in emerald green . . . and they're laced with arsenic.” Arsenic, she points out, is chemically quite similar to life-sustaining phosphorus and is itself relatively tasteless and odorless and blends easily. These traits allowed it to escape usual detection. Not being aware of its toxicity (just as tinned-foods manufacturers in the same period were unaware of the toxicity of the lead solder they used to seal tins of meat), Victorian-era producers of curtains and bookcloths, wallpaper and wall-hangings combined arsenic with copper acetoarsenite to make eye-popping visual delights. Wintethur’s Melissa Tedone highlighted its use in bookbinding as a colorant in both mass-produced and small-scale book binderies either by hand or machine. Dizziness, nausea, headaches, skin and mucus membrane irritations were common signs of arsenic poisoning, as were warts that developed on the fingers that handled precious tomes.
Books Will Speak Plain—and sometimes kill you.
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