The National Library of France (BnF) reported that it quarantined four 19th century books decorated with arsenic, to avoid any risk from this toxic product. The alert arose in the late 2010s, when a group of academics discovered this chemical element on the covers of books from that time.
A German-American research program called Poison Book Project (Poisoned Books Project) is responsible for identifying the affected books. The vast majority of the books known so far are found in the United States. The BnF He compared the titles already identified in other countries with his own catalog. And after carrying out the corresponding analyses, he found that only four volumes, of the 28 potentially affected, contained arsenic.
“These books have been quarantined and will undergo additional analysis by an external laboratory to evaluate the amount of arsenic present in each volume,” the institution indicated. All four were printed in Britain and are rarely consulted. These are two volumes of Irish ballads compiled by Edward Hayes in 1855, a bilingual anthology of Romanian poetry by Henry Stanley published in 1856 and a compendium of works of the British Royal Horticultural Society during the years 1862 and 1863.
Arsenic was appreciated at that time for the tone called “Schweinfurt green” or “Paris green” that it gave to the covers, and it was used between the years 1790 and 1880, according to the most current data. This pigment was used mainly in English-speaking countries and Germany, and more rarely in France.
The BnF indicated that he is investigating other books with green covers “beyond the list of the Poisoned Books Project”. In theory, readers who consult such works run the risk of discomfort or vomiting. The library specified that the risk to users was, a priori, very moderate.
In fact, no suspected cases of poisoning have been recorded anywhere in the world in recent years. German public libraries have begun an extensive investigation since March to find the affected books, with tens of thousands of analyzes to be carried out. The results are not yet known.
Fountain: AFP.
[Fotos: EFE/Gonzalo Fuentes/ Archivo]
