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Old books can be loaded with poison. To some collectors, that’s part of the thrill.

Melissa Tedone tests the covers of antique books for toxic heavy heavy metals
Nineteenth-century books line a shelf in Edgar Shannon Library at UVA. (Cal Cary / For The Washington Post)
Melissa Tedone, the associate director of the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation, holds a copy of “The Gem Annual” at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Wilmington, Del. Its telltale bright green bookcover led to it being tested for arsenic. (Hannah Beier / For The Washington Post)
Tedone says books with heavy metal pigments should be stored in a plastic bag to contain any shedding pigment. (Hannah Beier / For The Washington Post)
Tedone, shown here with art conservation graduate fellow Brittany Murray
Murray and Tedone use a Bruker Tracer to perform X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) analysis on a book. (Hannah Beier / For The Washington Post)
Todd Pattison, a Boston book conservator, says that during his 30 years of collecting, when he came across one of those “fairly rare books with that particular green color, I bought it strictly for that cover. Because it was so unusual.” (Cal Cary / For The Washington Post)
Pattison pores over books with Barbara Heritage, the director of collections, exhibitions and scholarly initiatives at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. (Cal Cary / For The Washington Post)
In 2019, Pattison learned from the Poison Book Project that the green books he was so drawn to contained arsenic.
Pattison looks at a 19th-century book at UVA’s Edgar Shannon Library. (Cal Cary / For The Washington Post)
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