Antiques Roadshow Detours

Adam Monahan:

Marsh, did you know that some books can be poisonous?

Marsha Bemko:

Here's the deal, Adam. What I've been hearing lately is that some books can be poisonous to your minds.

Adam Monahan:

I'm not talking about poisonous to your mind. I'm talking about books that if you licked them, they'd be poison.

Marsha Bemko:

Let me just say this. Whether the books are poisonous or not, I don't want to lick a lot of books.

Adam Monahan:

Wise words from my boss at GBH's Antiques Road Show, Marsha Bemko.

Marsha Bemko:

But I would hate to know, because you know how kids lick books and lick everything in sight?

Adam Monahan:

Yeah.

Marsha Bemko:

That they could die from a lick.

Adam Monahan:

What if your grandkids were roaming around your house? You catch them licking your poisonous books.

Marsha Bemko:

My children would never forgive me.

Adam Monahan:

No. You think they had a problem when they found your Nicorette gum?

Marsha Bemko:

Oh, that was a bad day. When my gum was stuck to the grandchild, I was almost disowned. So the poisonous books, that would be the end of me.

What kind of fool made poisonous books?

Adam Monahan:

The Victorians. The Victorians did this.

Melissa Tedone:

There was a toxic bright green pigment that contained arsenic.

Adam Monahan:

This is Melissa Tedone. She's an Assistant Professor of Art Conservation at the University of Delaware and one of the founders of the Poison Book Project.

She explains that in the Victorian era, this new beautiful green dye came on the market, emerald green. And unlike the green dyes of old, this one didn't fade. It stayed green.

Melissa Tedone:

This new bright pigment was just very appealing at a time during the Industrial Revolution where there was a lot of soot being produced, a lot of grime, everything was just kind of dirty. And so you're attracted to bright colors. They made you feel good. They made you think about nature.

Adam Monahan:

They also made you ill because that gorgeous appealing green was loaded with arsenic which can cause cancer, autoimmune disease, issues with your organs, and you know, the worst one, death.

Melissa had heard of this dye before. She knew it was in wallpaper, for instance. But one day she was working with a Victorian book and the green began to flick off in her hands.

Melissa Tedone:

And that seemed worrisome.

Adam Monahan:

"Wait," she thought, "my books have arsenic in them too?" It turns out, yes.

Melissa Tedone:

Sometimes my fingers do tingle when I'm working on books. And in the past I had always attributed that to the fact that it's quite chilly in the lab. But I have since learned that that is also a tip-off that you could be handling something covered in arsenic.

Adam Monahan:

And so, Melissa and colleague Rosie Grayburn started the Poison Book Project. They've tested and cataloged hundreds of books to figure out which ones are dyed with pigments containing arsenic and which ones are relatively safe.

So we appraise antique books.

Marsha Bemko:

Of course, tons of them. I mean, ridiculous money some of them. Are any of them poison?

Adam Monahan:

That's what I set out to find out.

Are our beloved TV guests in danger? Might they succumb to a grisly death by book poisoning? In this episode, we get to the bottom of it.

I'm Adam Monahan, and this is Antiques Roadshow Detours. Today, the most dangerous book.

I looked back at the pictures of our old book appraisals to see if we'd even had any green books on our show. Like a divorcee who's just discovered Tinder, I frantically clicked through photo after photo, hoping for a match. And so out of the 300 something books, I found one example with that type of green pigment from the Victorian era that was a possible candidate.

Marsha Bemko:

Which one?

Adam Monahan:

It's 20,000 Leagues Under The Seas.

Catherine Williamson:

What you have here is a first American edition of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

Adam Monahan:

This particular book was appraised in Hartford, Connecticut back in 2008. The guest, Fred, got it from his late great uncle's book collection. Or actually Fred himself got distracted by a bunch of worthless Civil War books.

Fred:

My wife picked this book out. She liked the pictures, the engravings.

Adam Monahan:

Just like a Victorian seeking respite from their grimy sooty life, Fred's wife was drawn to that beautiful green cover with its gold lettering and tiny gold picture of jellyfish under the title. I asked appraiser Catherine Williamson, what she remembers from that Antiques Roadshow event in Hartford.

Do you recall your trip to Hartford Connecticut?

Catherine Williamson:

I do.

Adam Monahan:

No, of course not.

Catherine Williamson:

No, I do because you know why I had just had a baby.

Adam Monahan:

Not the best time to be rubbing your hands all over a possibly poisoned book.

Does your kid have two heads by any chance?

Catherine Williamson:

No, she does not.

Adam Monahan:

You did a 20,000 Leagues Under The Seas book. Now perhaps you're smugly thinking, "I don't know why Adam keeps saying 20,000 Leagues Under The Seas. Any moron knows it's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea." Well, not so fast because as Catherine explained during the appraisal, it's sort of both.

Catherine Williamson:

Here on the cover, this is what we call a point. In book collecting a point is a characteristic that differs from book to book. So a point on this book is that the title says 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, but the title page says 20,000 Leagues Under The Seas. They corrected that later on.

Adam Monahan:

Yes, although everyone goes around saying 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, that's actually a mistranslation of the French. This story involves many distinct and various seas. I mean the things over 400 pages long. You think Jules Verne's going to spend all that time on one measly sea? And this sea-seas discrepancy is what helped Katherine identify this as a very valuable edition.

Catherine Williamson:

Your book is interesting to me because it proves that there's an exception to every rule. Now, I always tell people to collect books in the author's country of origin. Those are what we call the true first edition. You've got a first American edition that's actually more interesting than some of the earlier editions. What happened to most of the books that were published at this time is that they were destroyed in the Boston fire of 1872.

Adam Monahan:

The Great Boston Fire of 1872, an epic 12-hour blaze that reduced a large swath of the city to ruins. Frustratingly, the fire department had been ringing the alarm, so to speak, that a fire like this might happen. Fire Chief John Damrell had been telling the city that he needed a better water supply. "Oh, John," City Council told him, "Do not magnify the wants of your department so much." And so downtown Boston went up in flames along with most of this printing of 20,000 Leagues Under The Seas.

Marsha Bemko:

Most of that American edition was destroyed in the warehouse fire and so only a few copies got out.

Catherine Williamson:

This copy is probably a $10,000 book.

Fred:

Wow.

Catherine Williamson:

10,000 to $15,000 at auction. So I think even though you think you're a collector, your wife's a little bit better at this.

Fred:

Yeah, she's got a better eye.

Catherine Williamson:

Yeah, she's got better taste.

Adam Monahan:

Catherine tells me that before the 19th century, an alluring cover like this wouldn't even have existed. Covers were plain, titleless, just meant to protect the book. But as production got cheaper, publishers took over the printing and book binding process.

Marsha Bemko:

And then suddenly the covers are not just there to protect the book. That's real estate that can be used for marketing. So that's when titles show up on the cover is when the publisher takes over book binding. And to differentiate their product, they start using vivid colors and vivid decoration.

Adam Monahan:

Vivid colors full of poison.

Marsha Bemko:

There's like a bright yellow that I think is maybe chromium. Red has mercury in it. Yay, awesome. A lot of the blues or the purples, they have some lead in them. But the worst example is green.

You're not going to kill anybody. There's no murder mystery where I hand you a copy of this book and you die.

Adam Monahan:

Man, that would've been so cool though. Anyways, there are ways to handle the book safely, but if you don't know your book is poison, well, accidents can happen. What if you happen to be snacking on popcorn while you're reading? What if your dog chews on it? What if your grandchildren start licking it while they smack on your Nicorette gum?

And so not knowing what dogs or babies or other book licking freaks Fred may host in his home, I ask if I might be able to bring his book down to Delaware to get it tested for arsenic. And Fred enthusiastically agrees.

Fred:

Yeah, if you want to.

Adam Monahan:

Hey, Fred. How you doing there?

Fred's got the house of a true antiques roadshow aficionado.

You're obviously a collector. You have cool stuff everywhere.

Fred:

This is all my family stuff in here. Great-great-grandmother's quilts.

Adam Monahan:

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Seas seems like one of those books that everyone knows about, but very few people have actually read. Fred admits he's only ever made it through bits and pieces.

Fred:

It is boring as (censored). He goes so detailed in the scientific end of it.

Adam Monahan:

I got on that ride at Disney. That's it.

Fred:

Oh yeah, yeah.

Adam Monahan:

I mean like when you get on a submarine.

Fred:

I did too.

Adam Monahan:

And even that ride's kind of boring.

No offense to Mr. Verne. I mean, back in 1870 when the book was published, people probably got like one book a month. No one had Tik-Tok or even one of these modern office chairs you could spin yourselves around in. So under those conditions, sure, make the book as long as possible. But these days you read something like, "The sea contained the three kingdoms of nature, mineral, vegetable, and animal. This last is well represented by the four groups of zoophytes, by the three classes of articulata, by the five classes of mollusk," blabbity, blabbity, blah. It's like, "My God, get an editor."

Wanting to protect himself from possible arsenic poisoning, Fred took precautions, and so he hands over his $10,000 book in a plastic grocery bag from Stop & Shop.

Thank you for letting me borrow it.

Fred:

You're very welcome.

Adam Monahan:

And I will report back.

Fred:

Okay, thank you. Thank you, Adam.

Adam Monahan:

After the break, we're off to Delaware to test for poison.

So I'm at Winterthur meeting Melissa. I don't know if I should have locked my car or or not.

Winterthur is a museum, garden, and library on a huge estate. I'm meeting Melissa over by the library part where the Poison Book Project is based. Thanks for having me.

Melissa Tedone:

Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to Winterthur.

Adam Monahan:

Winterthur has some quirky stuff.

Melissa Tedone:

We're walking through the Dorrance Gallery of Soup Tureens.

Adam Monahan:

But our ultimate destination is the Scientific Research and Analysis Lab. There we meet up with Melissa's colleague, Rosie, the other half of the Poison Book Project.

Rosie Grayburn:

Welcome to the science lab.

Adam Monahan:

The lab is full of fancy looking doodads. That's a scientific term, I think. There's a persistent beeping in the background from a Geiger counter because, Rosie explains, the arsenic test involves x-rays and we don't want anyone to die of radiation poisoning on top of everything else.

Rosie Grayburn:

And so what this is doing is measuring the background radiation.

Adam Monahan:

Rosie and Melissa have tested a lot of books these past six years. And they've identified over 300 titles that contain arsenic. Back in the Victorian days, that emerald green dye was everywhere, not just in books, but in all kinds of stuff.

Melissa Tedone:

Everyone was aware that this was a toxic pigment and maybe it wasn't great to put it in all of our domestic products. And so there were doctors and consumer advocacy groups that were raising the alarm. And then there were economists and manufacturers who were saying, 'Whoa, come on. This is such a popular color. We don't want to deny people products colored with this color."

Adam Monahan:

Yeah, why would we deny the people their beautiful and highly lucrative greens just because of a little thing like poison? And one of emerald green's biggest advocates?

Melissa Tedone:

William Morris knew that his wallpapers contained these arsenic pigments and his family actually owned an arsenic mine. And so he was very much like, "Oh, I can't believe people are so upset about this. It's just not a big deal."

Adam Monahan:

As the owner of an arsenic mine might say.

It's like the cigarette company's going, "Come on guys, you're going to freak out about something as petty as lung cancer?"

Melissa Tedone:

But around the middle of the 1860s, that debate got really heated and there started to be a lot of reports of accidental poisonings, not specifically by book, but other products like women's ball gowns contained this pigment as well. Children's toys contained this pigment.

Adam Monahan:

Around this same time, the price of a dye called chrome green dropped. So now those businessmen could make as much money without the business harming side effect of accidental poisoning. So the question today is, was Fred's book dyed with emerald green, the dye that contains arsenic? Or was it colored with a safer dye, chrome green? I hand over the book in its grocery bag so Melissa and Rosie can take a look.

Melissa Tedone:

It is a nice vivid green. It's actually a beautiful binding. I love these jellyfish.

Adam Monahan:

It certainly looks emerald green, but most of the arsenic covers they've found have been from the 1850s and '60s. And Fred's book was published in 1873.

Which seems a little late.

Melissa Tedone:

A little late.

Adam Monahan:

Would this be the newest one of like-

Melissa Tedone:

It would be, yes.

Rosie Grayburn:

Yeah. If this contains arsenic, it would be right at the top end of our date range.

Adam Monahan:

Somebody else would have to beat it with an 1874. What I'm saying, I want to win the competition.

Rosie Grayburn:

Sure, sure.

Adam Monahan:

And a couple clues do point towards my imminent victory. For one, Melissa says they found arsenic in other books from Boston, plus-

Melissa Tedone:

The pigment on the book cloth is a little bit abraded.

Adam Monahan:

That is to say some of that green color is coming off.

Melissa Tedone:

And that is a sign of emerald green.

Rosie Grayburn:

There's something funny about the chemistry of arsenic that makes it very, very frayable. So that arsenic is basically eating away at the book cloth.

Adam Monahan:

Arsenic. It's poison for books as well as people.

But there's only one way to know for sure if this is an emerald or chrome green book. Rosie needs to test it with a tool that looks like a handheld ray gun.

Rosie Grayburn:

We love this instrument in conservation. It's called an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer, XRF spectrometer. And what it does is it uses x-rays to identify the elements present in an object or in this case a book. This is going to give us a straight out answer as to whether there is arsenic.

Adam Monahan:

Rosie finds a part of the cover that's pure green, no golden jellyfish in the way.

Rosie Grayburn:

The area that will be analyzed, it's about the size of a Tic Tac.

Adam Monahan:

And Melissa slides in a barrier plate so we can be sure we're testing just the book's cover.

Melissa Tedone:

The x-rays just go right through everything.

Adam Monahan:

And then it's go time.

Rosie Grayburn:

We're going to start it right now. Okay?

Melissa Tedone:

Okay.

Adam Monahan:

My heart is pounding. The suspense is killing me. I wait for Rosie to gasp, to say, "Adam, arsenic. You've won the competition." Maybe they'd even put my photo on the wall or something. Any second now the results will come through.

Rosie Grayburn:

And we're going to redo that because it's not connected.

Adam Monahan:

Of course.

Take two.

Rosie Grayburn:

So immediately here on the screen, seeing, we call them x-ray lines. So these are all giving us information about what elements are present in this book cloth. And we're going to do this for 30 seconds.

Adam Monahan:

Right now, PB la one is flying up.

Rosie Grayburn:

Can you remember what PB is?

Adam Monahan:

Peanut butter. No, lead?

Rosie Grayburn:

Lead, yeah.

Adam Monahan:

All right. PB's lead.

You know what PB's not? Arsenic.

Rosie Grayburn:

There would be a peak here if there was arsenic and I'm not seeing a peak there. So I would say this is lead containing, not arsenic containing. And CR, which is chromium.

Adam Monahan:

No arsenic to be found in Fred's book. Just chromium and plain old lead, which feels a lot less cool. There's no play called Lead And Chromium In Old Lace. There's no line in the musical Chicago where some murderess goes, "You know, some guys just can't hold their lead and chromium."

Still, says Melissa, chromium and lead are not exactly good.

Melissa Tedone:

Chromium and lead are toxic heavy metals. So if you ever get reports on your drinking water, chromium is one of the things they test for. What we've found with the books that do contain chromium and lead is that those heavy metals in the pigments stay really tightly bound to the book cloth. They don't tend to come off on your hands as easily as the arsenic does. So they're far less of a hazard than the arsenic containing books. So you still don't want to lick a chromium and lead containing book. You don't want to get it wet because then the pigment could come off on your hands. But if you keep it dry and you wash your hands afterwards before you eat something, it's perfectly safe.

Adam Monahan:

All right, well that's amazing. You know what? I get to deliver good news to the-

Melissa Tedone:

He can enjoy his boring book safely.

Adam Monahan:

He can fall asleep to page three over and over again and continue to do that.

Rosie Grayburn:

Absolutely.

Adam Monahan:

All right, great.

Now the thing is, I was rooting for it to be poisoned.

Marsha Bemko:

That's really sick of you, Adam.

Adam Monahan:

I know.

Marsha's right to shame me for my moral rot. Sorry, Fred. I really am glad you won't be dying of arsenic poisoning. And when it comes down to it, I think there's a valuable lesson here. If we as a society know something is a problem, we should fix it.

I'm glad that we came together and said, "Hey, we shouldn't have arsenic in everything we use. Let's get rid of this." It took decades though.

Marsha Bemko:

Well, Adam, you could have me go down this rabbit hole of the things in our house that we shouldn't be breathing and I don't even want to go there.

Adam Monahan:

Oh my gosh.

Marsha Bemko:

You know what I mean?

Adam Monahan:

Yeah. Maybe we shouldn't have plastic in our food.

Marsha Bemko:

I'm just saying..

Adam Monahan:

Yeah. And that's the thing. I think we can all get together and say like, "Listen, we don't want plastic in our food anymore."

Marsha Bemko:

Yeah, we're done.

Adam Monahan:

Let's work on that.

Marsha Bemko:

Yeah. Next problem.

Adam Monahan:

If you're worried, you might own a dangerous book, check out the Poison Book Projects website. You can request a color swatch bookmark, or look at their database of the books they've tested so far. And whether they're poisonous or not, please avoid licking your books wherever possible.

Antiques Road Show Detours is a production of GBH in Boston and distributed by PRX. This episode was written and produced by Kalila Holt, edited and mixed by Tyler Morissette. Our Assistant Producer is Sarah Roach. Our Senior Producer is Ian Coss and Devin Maverick Robins is the Managing Producer of Podcasts for GBH. Marsha Bemko is the Executive Producer of Antiques Roadshow Detours. And I'm your host and co-Executive Producer Adam Monahan. Our theme music is Once in a Century Storm by Will Dailey from the album National Throat. Thank you all for listening. Have a good one.