Books poisoned with arsenic present in French libraries

Four books containing arsenic, a carcinogenic substance, were removed from the shelves of the National Library of France (BnF), reports the newspaper Le Parisien. After the quarantine of more than 15,000 books in Germany in March, several French libraries looked into the subject.

Books potentially dangerous to health were identified by the presence of green on their cover and spine. Called “Paris green” or “Schweinfurt green”, this pigment was used in the 19th century to produce an emerald color. The toxicity of arsenic was known at the time, but its color popular and inexpensive to produce. Marketed in 1814 by the Wilhelm Dye and White Lead Company of Schweinfurt, Germany, it contained copper aceto-arsenite. According to GEO magazine, this very toxic complex was also administered at the time in Parisian sewers to kill rats. Use of the pigment was later stopped at the end of the century due to its toxicity, but most books containing it were not destroyed and have since circulated around the world. In January 2024, the Guinness World Record even recorded the most poisoned book in the world. This is a book by an American doctor called, Shadows from the Walls of Death. The book contains 36 grams of arsenic.

The BnF initially withdrew 27 works from its collection. Analyzes confirmed the presence of copper and arsenic on four of them. These are the books: Rouman anthology by Henry Stanley (1856), the Book of the royal horticultural society by Andrew Murray (1863) and two copies of Ballads of Ireland by Edward Hayes (1855). The BnF assured that the books were “very little in demand over the last ten years”.

Questioned by Le Parisien, the director of the toxicology laboratory at Garches University Hospital (Hauts-de-Seine), Jean-Claude Alvarès, wants to be reassuring. Anyone who handles such a work today “is not going to die”. There is still a risk of dizziness, stomach cramps or diarrhea when there is “prolonged, regular or repeated contact” with the book. Arsenic toxicity does not deteriorate over time.

In 2019, two American conservators from the University of Delaware library launched the Poison Book Project, which aims to catalog contaminated books. Nearly 270 references have since been listed, but this list could grow considerably. Among these books, fifteen were published in France: History of the Discovery and Conquest of America by Joachim Heinrich (1845), volumes four and five of the Works of Lavoisier (1868 and 1892), Souvenir of a Voyage by Evariste Régis (1857).

On April 7, the union of teaching professionals, SNPTES UNSA, sent a letter to the Ministry of Higher Education and Research asking it to “intervene with university libraries and documentation centers attached to the ministry », in order to initiate “an inventory and quarantine action”.

At the Sorbonne interuniversity library in Paris, the inventory has already started. For the moment, 70 works, likely to contain arsenic, have been labeled and covered with conservation material so that they cannot be handled with bare hands. The University of Strasbourg could also be concerned. According to Nathalie Frayon, general secretary of the union and librarian at the University of Strasbourg, all possible precautions must be taken. In the case of a potentially toxic book, “we request emergency digitization operations so as to allow the continued availability of these works,” she explains.