If you were planning to check out this weekend theBilingual anthology of Romanian poetry by Henry Stanley, the BNF has bad news for you: the book is in quarantine, along with three other works.
The reason ? These four 19th century works were decorated with “ green of Paris », a color containing arsenic and which could cause discomfort or vomiting in those who consult them. In theory at least because in reality, no cases have been reported anywhere in the world in recent years.
“Poisoned Books Project”
The alert came at the end of the 2010s from academics who discovered this chemical element on the covers of books dating from that time. A German-American research program called the Poison Book Project is trying to identify the books involved. The vast majority of those known so far are in the United States.
The BNF compared the titles already identified in other countries with its own catalog. And after analysis, four volumes out of the 28 potentially concerned did indeed contain arsenic.
“These works have been quarantined and will be subject to additional analysis by an external laboratory intended to evaluate the quantity of arsenic present in each volume,” indicated the institution which is looking at other books to the green cover “beyond the Poison Book Project list”.
The four works in quarantine have in common that they were printed in Great Britain, and rarely consulted. Arsenic was prized for the color called “Schweinfurt green” or “Paris green” that it gave to blankets, between the 1790s and 1880s according to the current database. This pigment was mainly used in English-speaking countries and Germany, more rarely in France.