The Washington Post recently ran an article about the University of Delaware’s Poison Book Project. The project is a research initiative to identify, handle and store toxic books safely. You can read about it on their website: https://sites.udel.edu/poisonbookproject/.
Publishers in the Victorian era used toxic pigments to produce brighter colors for book covers. Bright green covers contained arsenic, whereas yellow covers contained lead chromium. Along with arsenic, lead, and chromium, the researchers have also found mercury — all toxic heavy metals. The study of these practices even has a name — “bibliotoxicology.” If you have any brightly colored books published in the 1800s lying around, maybe contact the Poison Book Project?
Poison is a fascinating topic in both fiction and nonfiction. Writer Agatha Christie used strychnine in her first mystery, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes investigate a death by South American arrow poison in “A Study in Scarlet.” In Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” there is a description of acute arsenic poisoning. And, of course, there is the movie “Arsenic and Old Lace” (rent it from the library!).
According to a 1977 research study by the National Research Council, hairs from Napoleon Bonaparte that were analyzed contained arsenic in larger distribution than “samples from unexposed people.” How Bonaparte ingested arsenic is lost to history — but it may have been prescribed for him. Medical compounds containing arsenic — arsenicals — were widely used in the 18th and 19th centuries. There are reports of arsenic-eaters in 19th-century Europe, who built up immunities to the poison by ingesting increasingly larger doses over a period of time, but apparently there is no positive proof that these people were eating pure arsenic. Disclaimer: it’s probably best to avoid testing this theory, and limit your poison exposure to reading about toxins rather than eating them.
