The National Library of France quarantines four books decorated with arsenic

After the German libraries, it was the National Library of France’s turn to isolate works whose green covers were stained with arsenic. A process used in the 19th century.

The French National Library (BnF) quarantined four 19th century books decorated with arsenic to avoid any risk from this toxic product. The warning came in the late 2010s from academics who discovered this chemical element on the covers of books from that era.

German-American research program called Poison book project (“Poisoned Books Project”) is trying to identify the books in question. The vast majority of those known so far are located in the United States.

Few consulted books

BnF compared the titles already identified in other countries with its own catalogue. And after analysis, only four of the 28 potentially problematic notebooks actually contained arsenic. “These works have been quarantined and will undergo further analysis by an external laboratory with the aim of estimating the amount of arsenic present in each volume”they stated from that institution.

What the four works have in common is that they were printed in Great Britain and were rarely used. These are two volumes of Irish ballads collected by Edward Hayes in 1855, a bilingual anthology of Romanian poetry by Henry Stanley in 1856, and a collection of papers of the British Royal Horticultural Society for 1862-1863.

Other works reviewed

Arsenic was prized for a shade called “Schweinfurt green” or “Paris green” that it imparted to blankets between the 1790s and 1880s, according to the current database. This pigment was mainly used in English-speaking countries and Germany, a little in France.

BnF has indicated that it is considering other books with green covers “off the Poison Book Project list”. In theory, readers who view such works run the risk of feeling sick or vomiting.

The library specifies that the risk for users was a priori very moderately. In recent years, no suspicious cases of poisoning have actually been recorded anywhere in the world.

Since March, German public libraries have launched an extensive investigation to find the books in question, with tens of thousands of analyzes to be carried out. The results are not yet known.