Identifying Poisonous Pigments in Historical Books

Victorian-era books with brightly colored covers may look charming but are often laced with dangerous dyes containing heavy metals such as lead and chromium.

Researchers at Lipscomb University used advanced spectroscopic techniques to analyze these books and found that handling them could pose significant health risks. Their findings have prompted safety measures like sealing untested books in plastic and removing dangerous ones from circulation, aiming to raise awareness and encourage safer handling practices.

Victorian Era Poisonous Books

If you come across brightly colored, cloth-bound books from the Victorian era, you might want to handle them gently, or even steer clear altogether. Some of their attractive hues come from dyes that could pose a health risk to readers, collectors, or librarians. The latest research on these poisonous books used three techniques — including one that hasn’t previously been applied to books — to assess dangerous dyes in a university collection and found some volumes may be unsafe to handle.

The researchers will present their results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Fall 2024 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in person August 18-22; it features about 10,000 presentations on a range of science topics.

Research and Risks of Toxic Dyes

“These old books with toxic dyes may be in universities, public libraries, and private collections,” says Abigail Hoermann, an undergraduate studying chemistry at Lipscomb University. Users can be put at risk if pigments from the cloth covers rub onto their hands or become airborne and are inhaled. “So, we want to find a way to make it easy for everyone to be able to find what their exposure is to these books, and how to safely store them.” Hoermann, recent graduate Jafer Aljorani, and undergraduate Leila Ais have been conducting the study with Joseph Weinstein-Webb, an assistant chemistry professor at Lipscomb.

The study began after Lipscomb librarians Jan Cohu and Michaela Rutledge approached the university’s chemistry department to test brilliantly colored 19th- and early-20th-century fabric-covered books from the school’s Beaman Library. Weinstein-Webb was intrigued to hear about how the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library had previously examined its own 19th-century books for the presence of an arsenic compound known as copper acetoarsenite. This emerald-green pigment was used in Victorian-era wallpaper, garments and — as Winterthur found out — in cloth book covers. This discovery led to the launch of the Poison Book Project, a crowdsourced research effort that uses X-ray fluorescence (XRF), Raman spectroscopy, and other techniques to reveal toxic pigments in books around the world. Weinstein-Webb and the Lipscomb students he recruited launched their own investigation in 2022.

Techniques and Discoveries in Poisonous Pigments

For the Lipscomb book project, the team used three spectroscopic techniques:

• XRF to qualitatively check whether arsenic or other heavy metals were present in any of the book covers.
• Inductively coupled
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