“It had the power of a thousand scorpions…” - Umberto Eco, The Name of t

“It had the power of a thousand scorpions…” 

- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Sometimes books can kill.

Take this book, for example. Shadows from the Walls of Death is a 19th century collection of arsenic-laced wallpaper samples. Each of the striking specimens was colored with an arsenic-based pigment, and touching the pages with your bare hands could make you seriously ill, or worse.

Hopefully by now you’ve read our 2015 Tumblr post onShadowsor Atlas Obscura’s recent article on the poison book, but here’s some background in case you haven’t:

Copper arsenite was not an uncommon ingredient in paints and pigments throughout the 19th century, most often used to produce the vibrant greens known as Paris Green or Scheele’s Green. While people of the time knew that arsenic was dangerous if ingested, they saw little risk in using the poisonous element to color wallpaper – after all, who’s going around licking their walls?

But then in the 1870s, Robert Kedzie – a doctor, MSU chemistry professor, and public health advocate – showed that fine particles of this arsenical wallpaper could shed when touched, or worse: they could “dust off” into the air, causing people to fall ill and die by just existing in a house coated with the stuff.

Kedzie put together 100 books of the deadly wallpaper samples and sent them to libraries throughout Michigan, to educate the public about the potential dangers of this common household item. 

Only a handful of copies of this toxic book remain  – most were destroyed long ago due to their poison pages. Of the surviving volumes, MSU’s copy is believed to be the most extensive, or most complete – containing over 130 individual wallpaper samples.

Most of the wallpaper specimens feature the color green, but not all – the same arsenical dye that went into the infamous Paris Green or Scheele’s Green was often mixed to form other colors, and many of our samples boast beautiful deep blues and golden yellows.

Most of the images here have never been seen before. Some day it’s possible that we will digitize our copy of Shadows, as the National Library of Medicine has done with theirs, but that poses some significant challenges. 

In the meantime, every page in our copy has been painstakingly encapsulated in archival sleeves – meaning that patrons can safely view the book up close without fear of succumbing to arsenic poisoning. But if you can’t make it out to see the volume in person, I hope you will enjoy these new photos of this intriguingly beautiful book.

Beautiful, but deadly.

~Andrew