In recent weeks, thousands of books have been removed from German libraries, suspected of being contaminated with arsenic. In question: a green pigment used in the 19th century to color leather. And Germany is not the only one concerned. In neighboring Alsace, the National and University Library of Strasbourg is also carrying out checks.
Books contaminated with arsenic… It almost seems like the summary of Umberto Eco’s novel, In the name of the Rose, but the story is very real. In recent weeks, thousands of books have been removed from German libraries, suspected of being contaminated with arsenic. In question: a green pigment, used in the 19th century to color leather. And Germany is not the only one concerned. In neighboring Alsace, the National and University Library of Strasbourg is also carrying out checks.
Ant work
It is in secret rooms that the old books of the BNU of Strasbourg are stored. Among them, potentially contaminated 19th century works. “From the 1840s, it was very fashionable to have green books and to produce this green, we used arsenic, therefore a dangerous product only when we breathe it,” explains Jérôme Schweitzer, curator at the library.
Arsenic can cause discomfort, vomiting and even cancer. So Jérôme Schweitzer and his colleagues try to remove all the books with emerald green covers from the shelves. Except that… “It’s possible that we kept the original cover with arsenic, but that we bound it with a conservation binding. And so we would have to open the books to find out if the cover is there or not,” confides the curator. A job that will take months because the BNU has hundreds of thousands of works dating from the century in question.
“If we put all the books we have end to end, it would cover 70 kilometers of shelves. Hence the difficulty in identifying books that could present a risk,” he adds. If such a book were to appear, it would first be digitized before being stored in an airtight box.
