POTW: Poison Books

Many of the endsheets and title pages of the Center for Brooklyn History’s books are inscribed with holiday greetings, indicating that they were once given as gifts during the winter season. No harm ever came from gifting a book, right? Well, that depends on whether or not the book is bound in highly poisonous arsenical green pigment. In this Photo of the Week, we take a look at one such poisonous book in the collection: First Impressions of the New World of Two Travelers from the Old, in the Autumn of 1858, anonymously published by Isabella Strange Trotter (which is a delightfully appropriate author’s name for a poison-bound book about one’s travels).

While we cannot definitively determine a book’s poisonous status without chemical testing, Trotter’s green binding bears all the hallmarks of highly friable arsenical pigment:

• Cloth binding in a particularly vibrant green, somewhat yellower in tone than the more widely found emerald bindings - check
• Browning spine - check
• Gold and blind stamping - check
• British or American publication - check (British)
• Published between the 1840s and 1860s - check (1859)

This helpful checklist list of arsenical binding characteristics was developed by the Poison Book Project, an initiative launched by Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library and the University of Delaware. Their work in bibliotoxicology helps us at the Center for Brooklyn History keep our patrons and staff safe from accidental poisoning. So what do we do with a poison book? First Impressions has been safely stowed in an archival grade ziploc bag and isolated in Poison Books box 1, as part of the library’s special collections. On the rare occasion that it is handled, nitrile gloves are required.

Many jewel-tone cloth bindings from the 19th century consist of poisonous elements, including chromium and lead (e.g. chrome yellow). While these books should not be licked, they’re not likely to make the book reader terribly ill. However, arsenic green, also known as Scheele’s green, is an especially friable pigment that can flake onto hands in microscopic, easily transferable particles. It’s the same green that took the fashion and interior design worlds by storm in the first half of the 19th century…and led to a slew of ailments and deaths.

So, while the exact levels of harmful contact are undergoing determination, we play it safe with our suspiciously green bindings. Access to First Impressions is available through a digitized copy on the Internet Archive, made available by Oxford University. 
 

Interested in seeing more books and photos from CBH’s collections? Consult our library research guide for books, directories, maps and more. Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal of Brooklyn Public Library. We welcome appointments to research our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.