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France’s national library has set aside four 19th-century books to test for potential arsenic contamination.
The chemical may have been used to colour the emerald green binding of the books, which were printed in Britain.
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“We have put these works in quarantine and an external laboratory will analyze them to evaluate how much arsenic is present in each volume,” the library told Agence France Presse.
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In the Victorian era, arsenic-laced colorants that look emerald green were widely used, partly because the pigments resembled the green hues found in nature. They were replaced in the late 19th century by a much safer cobalt green.
The potentially contaminated copies were identified by U.S. researchers by the University of Delaware’s Poison Book Project (PBP).
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Although the amount of arsenic the covers are laced with are likely harmless, the books were being removed for a closer inspection, the library said.
The offending books consist of two copies of The Ballads of Ireland by Edward Hayes (1855), an anthology of Romanian poetry by Henry Stanley (1856) and a Royal Horticultural Society book (1862).
A search of the books on the PBP website shows the cloth binding material contains arsenic. Arsenic can also be found in green leather and paper covers, according to PBP. It was not known until the 20th century that the chemical was dangerous when inhaled.
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More than half of the clothbound 19th-century books analyzed by the Poison Book Project contain lead in the book cloth, according to the PBP website.
“Analysis of a range of bookcloth colors has identified iron, copper, and zinc, which, while technically heavy metals by density, are generally considered not to be toxic,” it reads. “Analysis has also identified the following highly toxic heavy metals: arsenic, chromium, lead, and mercury.”
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