pinball1970
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- The American Chemical Society report that dangerous chemicals have been isolated from books room 19th and early 20th century.
From the article in phys org. today.
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-evidence-stacks-poisonous-toxic-dyes.html
"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 plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) to determine the concentration of those metals.
X-ray diffraction (XRD) to identify the pigment molecules that contain those metals.
Although XRD has been previously used to examine paintings and wallpaper, this is the first time it has been used to check for poison in books, Ais says. The XRD testing is being done in collaboration with Janet Macdonald at Vanderbilt University."
This piqued my interest because industry has been cleaning up regarding dangerous chemistry with fairly recent legislation like REACh 2007 https://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/understanding-reach and NGOs with things like DETOX 2011
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/publication/17612/destination-zero/
So items that are already out there but have historical value like old, rare and valuable books, pose a problem.
Especially to handlers, researchers and Librarians.
John Rylands Library established 1900, Portico 1806 and Chetham's library 1653 will have a few candidates I would have thought, that is just Manchester!
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-evidence-stacks-poisonous-toxic-dyes.html
"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 plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) to determine the concentration of those metals.
X-ray diffraction (XRD) to identify the pigment molecules that contain those metals.
Although XRD has been previously used to examine paintings and wallpaper, this is the first time it has been used to check for poison in books, Ais says. The XRD testing is being done in collaboration with Janet Macdonald at Vanderbilt University."
This piqued my interest because industry has been cleaning up regarding dangerous chemistry with fairly recent legislation like REACh 2007 https://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/understanding-reach and NGOs with things like DETOX 2011
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/publication/17612/destination-zero/
So items that are already out there but have historical value like old, rare and valuable books, pose a problem.
Especially to handlers, researchers and Librarians.
John Rylands Library established 1900, Portico 1806 and Chetham's library 1653 will have a few candidates I would have thought, that is just Manchester!