Author Topic: The Winterthur Poison Book Project warns that some OLD Books are Dangerous!!!  (Read 751 times)

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The Winterthur Poison Book Project warns that some books scattered throughout the world are literally poisonous!!!



http://wiki.winterthur.org/wiki/Poison_Book_Project

https://www.iiconservation.org/content/poison-book-project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_Book_Project

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/these-green-books-are-literally-poisonous


Quote
Libraries and rare book collections often carry volumes that feature poisons on their pages, from famous murder mysteries to seminal works on toxicology and forensics. The poisons described in these books are merely words on a page, but some books scattered throughout the world are literally poisonous.

These toxic books, produced in the 19th century, are bound in vivid cloth colored with a notorious pigment known as emerald green that’s laced with arsenic. Many of them are going unnoticed on shelves and in collections. So Melissa Tedone, the lab head for library materials conservation at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware, has launched an effort dubbed the Poison Book Project to locate and catalogue these noxious volumes.

To date, the team has uncovered 88 19th-century books containing emerald green. Seventy of them are covered with vivid green bookcloth, and the rest have the pigment incorporated onto paper labels or decorative features. Tedone even found an emerald green book on sale at a local bookstore, which she purchased.

While these poisonous books would likely cause only minor harm unless someone decided to devour a nearly 200-year-old tome, the alluringly vibrant books are not totally without risk. People who handle them frequently, such as librarians or researchers, may accidentally inhale or ingest particles that contain arsenic, which could make them feel lethargic and light-headed or suffer from diarrhea and stomach cramps. Against the skin, arsenic can cause irritations and lesions. Serious cases of arsenic poisoning can lead to heart failure, lung disease, neurological dysfunction, and - in extreme situations - death.

So just how common are these poison green books? “It's somewhat hard to predict because our data set is still small, but I would certainly expect there could be thousands of these books around the world,” Tedone says. “Any library that collects mid-19th-century cloth publishers' bindings is likely to have at least one or two.”

http://wiki.winterthur.org/wiki/Poison_Book_Project

 

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