A student project at Western University has identified nearly 100 Victorian-era books in the university’s library system that contain traces of arsenic. Third-year English student Karen Wen discovered the toxic green-covered volumes—nicknamed “poison books”—while studying materials from Western’s library system. Working with Western’s Earth and Planetary Materials Analysis Laboratory, Wen confirmed the presence of copper and arsenic using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. Western Special Collections Librarian Deborah Meert-Williston said the books are safe if handled with care and preserved in polyethylene bags: “I would say you wouldn’t want to take one of these books home and have a toddler chew on it,” said Meert-Williston “[b]ut, for the most part, they’re not really dangerous.”
