The Bibliothèque nationale de France has removed from its shelves four 19th-century books whose green covers the institution believes may be laced with arsenic. The library will check other books with green covers. The Guardian reports this.
Gone from the library’s shelves were two volumes of Edward Hayes’s Ballads of Ireland, published in 1855, Henry Stanley’s bilingual anthology of Romanian poetry from 1856, and a Royal Horticultural Society book from 1862-63. They are all printed in the UK.
The library believes that the books may cause only minor harm to the reader, but they will still be taken away for further analysis. “We have quarantined these books and will have them analyzed by an outside laboratory to determine how much arsenic is contained in each volume,” the library said in a statement.
Checking books for toxic elements began in 2019. Then, researchers from the University of Delaware discovered that Victorian-era publishers added arsenic to the green pigment they used to color book bindings.
American scientists have compiled a list of potentially dangerous volumes as part of the Poison Book Project. Green binders laced with arsenic pose a health hazard to librarians, booksellers, collectors and researchers and should be handled with care, researchers say.
As The Guardian notes, the World Health Organization has warned that long-term exposure to arsenic through drinking water and food can lead to skin lesions and skin cancer. However, WHO did not mention exposure to items containing arsenic.
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Tags: French library test books green covers arsenic content
