While toxic green goods flooded parts of Europe and the United States, another invention transformed the bookmaking industry. Despite the risks, emerald green was ingrained into Victorian life-a color to literally die for.
Wallpapers shed toxic green dust that covered food and coated floors, and clothing colored with the pigment irritated the skin and poisoned the wearer. To say that Victorian England was bathed in emerald green is an understatement: By 1860 more than 700 tons of the pigment had been produced in the country alone.Īrsenic’s toxicity was known at the time, but the vibrant color was nevertheless popular and cheap to produce. It was used everywhere, from clothing and wallpaper to fake flowers and paint. The toxic pigment was commercially developed in 1814 by the Wilhelm Dye and White Lead Company in Schweinfurt, Germany.
A color to die forĮmerald green, also known as Paris green, Vienna green, and Schweinfurt green, is the product of combining copper acetate with arsenic trioxide, producing copper acetoarsenite. “Any library that collects mid-19th-century cloth publishers' bindings is likely to have at least one or two.” So just how common are these poison green books? “It's somewhat hard to predict because our data set is still small, but I would certainly expect there could be thousands of these books around the world,” Tedone says. Serious cases of arsenic poisoning can lead to heart failure, lung disease, neurological dysfunction, and-in extreme situations-death. Against the skin, arsenic can cause irritations and lesions. People who handle them frequently, such as librarians or researchers, may accidentally inhale or ingest particles that contain arsenic, which could make them feel lethargic and light-headed or suffer from diarrhea and stomach cramps. While these poisonous books would likely cause only minor harm unless someone decided to devour a nearly 200-year-old tome, the alluringly vibrant books are not totally without risk. Tedone even found an emerald green book on sale at a local bookstore, which she purchased. Seventy of them are covered with vivid green bookcloth, and the rest have the pigment incorporated onto paper labels or decorative features. To date, the team has uncovered 88 19th-century books containing emerald green. So Melissa Tedone, the lab head for library materials conservation at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware, has launched an effort dubbed the Poison Book Project to locate and catalogue these noxious volumes. Many of them are going unnoticed on shelves and in collections. These toxic books, produced in the 19th century, are bound in vivid cloth colored with a notorious pigment known as emerald green that’s laced with arsenic. The poisons described in these books are merely words on a page, but some books scattered throughout the world are literally poisonous. Scantrons and Green Books can still be purchased in several vending machines on campus and at the bookstore.Libraries and rare book collections often carry volumes that feature poisons on their pages, from famous murder mysteries to seminal works on toxicology and forensics. Additionally, students will be able to pick up up to 3 items per day through the Spring Semester. Students will now be able to pick up any combination of 30 scantrons (pink or brown) throughout a semester as well as up to 4 greenbooks.
Scantrons and Green Books can be picked up during regular business hours at any of the following locations.
Several times throughout the semester, we provide free breakfast to students at our Brain Food events, to keep your mind fueled during classes, exams, homework, and projects, so check out our calendar for Brain Food events and others! We also provide free printing (see below), and 24-hour study spaces. Additionally, SG provides a variety of scholarships each semester, for a broad range of students. SG wants students to succeed in their classes, and providing testing materials free of charge is just one way we work towards that goal. In 2011, the McCann-Brock Administration extended this service to include free blue books (now green books), fulfilling the needs of students in different disciplines. While the program’s primary intention was to encourage students to seek out the SG office and meet their representatives, it quickly evolved into a service that students relied on. Since its inception, the SG “Free Scantron Initiative” has provided Scantrons, free of cost, to tens of thousands of students each year.