I Never Thought It Was Possible,

but reading can kill you!

photograph STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP, last year I made a post about how arsenic used in some book covers could be deadly, well it appears that other covers that contain the deadly chemical have been found, in France's national library, above, the books were taken off the shelves were identified as potentially dangerous by University of Delaware researchers, the library said the books would only cause minor harm from handling them, "We have put these works in quarantine and an external laboratory will analyse them to evaluate how much arsenic is present in each volume," said a spokesperson from the National Library of France, the four books include the 1862-1863 book of the Royal Horticultural Society, two volumes of Edward Hayes' "The Ballads of Ireland" from 1855, and an 1856 bilingual anthology of Romanian poetry by Henry Stanley, the list of potentially hazardous titles was put together by the Poison Book Project. The initiative is run by researchers from the University of Delaware in collaboration with Delaware's Winterthur Museum,

photograph Leeds City Council, also another deadly volume was found closer to home, My Own Garden: The Young Gardener's Yearbook was published in 1855 and has a vivid green cover, senior librarian Rhian Isaac discovered the book while cross-referencing the library's collection against the Poison Book Project's global database of known toxic texts, I wonder how many more volumes of death are lurking out there in your local library? I jest, Allie Alvis, a rare book collections cataloguer for Washington, D.C., book dealer Type Punch Matrix and a former special collections reference librarian at the Smithsonian Libraries, has researched books containing arsenic dating back to the 17th century stated that: "We are not aware of any cases of anyone getting seriously ill from handling a book like this," she said. "We just want to make people aware of the potential hazards so that we can avoid any tragedy ever happening from one of these books." the article is here.