The Bibliotheque Nationale de France has so far identified four toxic books in its collection.
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TOXIC TEXTS
In Paris, staff at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France have been scouring their holdings of more than 16 million books for toxic volumes laced with arsenic. In the 19th century, British publishers frequently used arsenic compounds to create bright green pigments such as Paris Green, Emerald Green and Scheele’s Green that were used on book covers. Handling bindings dyed with these from 1855, and an 1856 bilingual anthology of Romanian poetry by Henry Stanley. “We have put these works in quarantine and an external laboratory will analyse them to evaluate how much arsenic is present in each volume,” the library said. They plan to examine further books “beyond the Poison Book Project list”.
