You, Dear Reader, now, know both that only you can prevent forest fires and that you might wish to have examined, that lovely set of Victorian-era novels by Sir Walter Scott, you know, the ones with the vibrant slivers of green dye-cloth laid onto their spines and that feature the fanciful blue lettering and designs on their covers.
Previously, I touched on several ways in which 19th-century wallpaper, curtains and drapes and especially bookcloths covering sometimes quite rare books proved to be toxic still nearly two centuries later. The joint efforts of the Winterthur Museum, Library & Garden and the University of Delaware resulted in the Poison Book Project. Literally several hundreds of suspicious books have been sent to it for inspection, analysis and verdict. Chromium, mercury and arsenic were once routinely added to the dyecloths used to bind and decorate book covers.
“Prussian Blue” was one such that sometimes proved to be particularly toxic. The industrial chemist S.W. Hayter, in his definitive tome, New Ways of Gravure (1966, p. 57), explains the process by which the color is made manifest: “1 part nitric acid to 2 parts water. There should be some copper in the solution or the acid will not bite regularly. Some old acid may be added; or a copper penny dropped in for a few minutes until the acid is coloured blue. Nitric acid reacts with copper to produce bubbles of nitric oxide gas” (quoted from Ruthven Todd’s paean in Blake: the quarterly newsletter). Recently, I encountered “Recherches Chimiques sur la Teinture” and “Premiere Note sur Quelques Proprietes du Bleu de Prusse,” published in 1837 and roughly the 1850s, respectively. “Prussian Blue” pigments used in Victorian-era binderies and print-shops proved chemical reactions as the dyestuff came into contact with textiles and light.
This Prussian Blue had nothing to do with the Zyklon-B used at Auschwitz or even the tablets used in some penitentiaries in the U.S. still carrying out capital punishments. Neither is Prussian Blue analogous to lead-poisoning much less to that from arsenic ingestion. Yet and still, copper remains a poison. That’s why there are “tailings dams” at copper mines (to keep the copper out of the water supply). Copper remains the main ingredient in modern pesticides or parasiticides aimed at eradicating the crab louse, Phthirus pubis, in the form of the “blue ointment” fashioned from Cupric sulfate, also known as copper sulfate, blue vitriol and blue stone.
So, if you don’t want to get crabs, pick up an old blue book from the 1840s. Wait, that didn’t come out right. Write to me at: [email protected] . Find me at http://www.svafinebooks.com.
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