Arsenic-laced books removed from French library
By Cat McGowan
Four books have been removed from France’s national library over concerns their covers may be laced with poisonous arsenic.
The 19th century volumes, printed in Britain, all have emerald green covers. Arsenic was commonly used to colour books at the time.
The texts taken off the shelves were identified as potentially dangerous by University of Delaware researchers.
The library said the books would only cause minor harm from handling them.
“We have put these works in quarantine and an external laboratory will analyse them to evaluate how much arsenic is present in each volume,” said a spokesperson from the National Library of France.
The four books include the 1862-1863 book of the Royal Horticultural Society, two volumes of Edward Hayes’ “The Ballads of Ireland” from 1855, and an 1856 bilingual anthology of Romanian poetry by Henry Stanley.
The list of potentially hazardous titles was put together by the Poison Book Project. The initiative is run by researchers from the University of Delaware in collaboration with Delaware’s Winterthur Museum.
The team has tested hundreds of book covers for heavy metals since 2019 and drawn up a list of titles that are potentially dangerous.
