Did you know that some books are actually poisonous? According to a recent article in the Washington Post, green books, printed around the Victorian era, can actually be quite poisonous due to the dyes used to color the cloth covers of the volumes.
The University of Delaware started the Poison Book Project in 2022 "to identify books still in circulation that were produced using the toxic pigments." The most dangerous of these pigments was arsenic!
The Washington Post had a big article highlighting the dangers of these special books, and giving advice for how to take care of them so they don't harm the reader.
The green books are not the only dangerous ones. Chrome yellow is another on the list.
I am pretty sure we have some books bound in green cloth, although I will have to scour the stacks. Apparently, it's only a vivid shade of green, mostly with elaborate illustrations on the covers, not the early 1900's medical journals that we have.
Thanks to the Washington Post, the University of Delaware and the Winterthur Museum for the photos!
Hello Meg, It is a good idea to be wary of all old dyed or pigmented items, new ones too for that matter. I don't know how deadly these old colored books really are, at least if you keep them away from tiny babies. I have never seen an adult licking a book. There seems to be a plot nowadays to get rid of physical books, making us more dependent on potentially doctored (and in the future predictably more expensive) ones on the internet. I am an avid reader of old books, and have not yet been poisoned by them. I flipped through the U. of Delaware site but could not quickly find any concrete information (on, say, the amount of arsenic that can be transferred to damp fingers and ingested). So, while I do not doubt the technical veracity of these reports, it seems to me another attempt to disincentivize Americans to keep and read old books.
ReplyDelete--Jim
I think I stopped chewing on books by about age three! And most likely, no one handles these books long enough to be poisoned by them!
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