The national library of France removed from its shelves four 19th century booksthe emerald green covers of which are believed to be enriched with arsenic.
The library said on Thursday that use of the books, which were printed in Britain, was likely to cause little harm, but it removed them from the public for further analysis. “We have quarantined these projects and an external laboratory will analyze them to estimate how much arsenic is in each volume,” he said, according to the Guardian.
The Paris foundation located the disputed copies after American researchers discovered that Victorian-era publishers they used the chemical to color the bindings. Green pigments containing arsenic were called Paris green, emerald green, or Scheele green, named after a German-born chemist.
By checking hundreds of book covers for heavy metals from 2019, University of Delaware researchers compiled a list of potentially dangerous tomes under the Poison Book Project.
The French library found that its collection of more than 16 million titles included four copies of books in the catalog. Among them are included two volumes of The Ballads of Ireland of Edward Hayes, published in 1855, a bilingual anthology of Romanian poetry of Henry Stanley from 1856 and the Royal Horticultural Society’s book of 1862-63.
The National Library of France stated that will consider other books as well with green cover beyond the Poison Book Project catalogue.
The World Health Organization warns that long-term exposure to inorganic arsenic, mainly through drinking water and food, can lead to skin lesions and skin cancerbut makes no mention of contact with objects containing it.
The Poison Book Project reports that green bindings with arsenic constitute health risk of librariansof booksellersof collectors and of researchers and must be handled and stored with care.
