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Poisonous Elements in Antique Book Bindings
New research highlights the presence of hazardous chemicals in nineteenth-century green books
I’ve always been fascinated by books, and I keep a small collection of first editions by Portuguese authors, some dating back to the 19th century.
I first came across the concept of poisonous books back in my teen years when I read Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980), where the deadly volume turns out to be a rare manuscript, the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, focused on comedy.
Eco’s storyline immediately grips the reader. Jorge of Burgos, a Benedictine monk who was the abbey’s librarian, laces the pages with poison, believing laughter threatens religious authority and undermines the fear of God. The monk expected anyone who read the book would lick their fingers to turn the pages, thus ingesting the deadly poison.
Poisoning by books was something I had never considered until then, and it would take decades until I realized how, occasionally, reality proves stranger than fiction.
In recent years, scientific research has identified several toxic and even poisonous elements used in book-binding, after arsenic was first detected in the so-called “green books,” published in the Victorian era.
