The toxic pigment was commercially developed in 1814 by the Wilhelm Dye and White Lead Company in Schweinfurt, Germany. A color to die forĮmerald green, also known as Paris green, Vienna green, and Schweinfurt green, is the product of combining copper acetate with arsenic trioxide, producing copper acetoarsenite. “Any library that collects mid-19th-century cloth publishers' bindings is likely to have at least one or two.” So just how common are these poison green books? “It's somewhat hard to predict because our data set is still small, but I would certainly expect there could be thousands of these books around the world,” Tedone says. Serious cases of arsenic poisoning can lead to heart failure, lung disease, neurological dysfunction, and-in extreme situations-death. Against the skin, arsenic can cause irritations and lesions. People who handle them frequently, such as librarians or researchers, may accidentally inhale or ingest particles that contain arsenic, which could make them feel lethargic and light-headed or suffer from diarrhea and stomach cramps. While these poisonous books would likely cause only minor harm unless someone decided to devour a nearly 200-year-old tome, the alluringly vibrant books are not totally without risk. Tedone even found an emerald green book on sale at a local bookstore, which she purchased. Ninety of them are covered with vivid green bookcloth, and the rest have the pigment incorporated onto paper labels or decorative features. To date, the team has uncovered more than 150 19th-century books containing emerald green. So Melissa Tedone, the lab head for library materials conservation at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware, has launched an effort dubbed the Poison Book Project to locate and catalogue these noxious volumes. Many of them are going unnoticed on shelves and in collections. These toxic books, produced in the 19th century, are bound in vivid cloth colored with a notorious pigment known as emerald green that’s laced with arsenic. The poisons described in these books are merely words on a page, but some books scattered throughout the world are literally poisonous. Libraries and rare book collections often carry volumes that feature poisons on their pages, from famous murder mysteries to seminal works on toxicology and forensics.
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