Some book produced in the 19th century are bound in vivid green cloth colored with a notorious pigment that’s laced with arsenic. Many of them are going unnoticed on shelves and in collections
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.
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.”
“It was a game changer,” Tedone says. “Cloth was so much less expensive than leather, which meant you could sell books at different price points.” The process affected more than just the publisher’s bottom line; it changed how books were read. “They were making books accessible to a much wider demographic, catering to people on all levels of the economic spectrum.”
With the beautiful yet broken book under the microscope, Tedone peered at the front board. “There was a black, waxy excretion on the surface, and I was trying to pick it off of the bookcloth with a porcupine quill,” she says. “And then I noticed the colorant in the bookcloth was flaking off really easily around the area where I was working.”
The sensitivity of these techniques is key, but equally important is that they are nondestructive. “You shouldn’t be damaging works of art,” Grayburn says.
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