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PHOTOGRAPH BY REBECCA HALE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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The most dangerous books in the library are not from Toni Morrison, Ayn Rand, or Judy Blume. They are not parables about penguins or Holocaust-era mice.
The most dangerous books are dusty, emerald-green volumes with traces of arsenic on the cover and often in illustrations inside. People who handle them frequently, such as librarians or researchers, may accidentally inhale or ingest the poisoned particles.
“There could be thousands of these books around the world,” says Melissa Tedone, of Delaware’s Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, who has launched an effort dubbed the Poison Book Project to locate and catalogue these noxious volumes.
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