Growing up in Kansas, my childhood was somewhat lacking in the “old stuff” department. It was only on my visits to my paternal grandparents in far-away Virginia that I got a taste for object-based history, thanks to their voluminous antique collections. While they both had their favorite collecting areas – dolls for my grandma, and radios for my grandpa – they collected pretty much anything old that they were drawn to for whatever reason. Everything had a story, and they were quick to tell it: my grandpa had kluged together these two 1890s desks for some specific purpose, my grandma remembered her grandma telling her about this kind of porcelain knick-knack.
When I was young, I had some trouble wrapping my head around where one collection began and another ended. I no longer have this problem, because I have built a book collection that does the exact same thing! I keep my eye out for miniature books, for Arts and Crafts fine bindings, for books with weird vernacular repairs, for books that show off their materials in interesting ways… the most important things to me are that I like them, and that they can tell stories through their physical form. This apparently hereditary urge to talk to people about material culture has also driven my library career and research interests, which definitely skew towards communication and the history of the book as an object. These three arsenic green bindings are verdant examples of the fascinating tales books carry with them beyond the words on their pages.
John Tallis. Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851. London and New York: J. Tallis and Co., 1852.
Volume 3.
This three-volume work details the sights of the Great Exhibition in hundreds of engravings. Its vibrant publisher’s cloth binding, featuring a gilt stamped image of the Crystal Palace, has become the poster child for the Poison Book Project at Winterthur Library and the University of Delaware. The Project found this green variant of the binding to be colored with copper acetoarsenite, more commonly known as Emerald Green. I acquired this third volume for my personal collection in the process of researching books identified as arsenical for a paper published in Studies in Conservation in 2024.
J.-B.-J. Champagnac. Le Prix d’Encouragement du Premier Age ou le Précepte et l’Example. Paris: Librairie de l’Enfance et de la Jeunesse, P. - C. Lehuby, circa 1830.
Much of the study of arsenical books has so far focused on the use of Emerald Green on book cloth, but it was also extensively used on coated papers, such as those that make up this cartonnage binding. It is easy to see why the pigment was so appealing: gift books like this one were made to be relatively cheap, and the green added an eye-catching pop of color without needing to resort to more expensive materials like dyed morocco.
Julie Delafaye-Bréhier. Les Jeunes Filles, ou le Monde et le Solitude. Paris: Alexís Eymery, 1822.
Volume 1.
Once a six-volume set, this moralistic work now exists in only five volumes: one volume donated its binding to science. For the 2025 article “Handling ‘Poison Books’: Dry versus Wet Scenarios,” Melissa Tedone submerged the sixth volume to understand how a potential water event in a library would affect the safety risk posed by arsenical bindings. The remaining five volumes are the centerpiece of my cartonnage binding collection.
