We’re all familiar with the serious threats that contemporary media pose to our health. Toxic social media feeds, fake news, brain rot, poor posture, eating disorders, server farms, cobalt mines: it can all make you feel like hurling your device across the room and turning to the simpler pleasures of the printed word. In such a moment, a book or a journal can feel like a respite, or a safe harbor.
But as a crisp and intriguing new show at the Walters Art Museum demonstrates, books and manuscripts also endangered the physical health of their creators and their users, over the course of centuries. We’re not talking about narrative content here; the culture wars surrounding Mark Twain and Toni Morrison belong to a different conversation.
Instead, the cheekily titled If Books Could Kill (on view through August 5, 2025) focuses on toxic materials—mercury, arsenic, and lead—that were used by scribes, illustrators, and printers in a variety of historical contexts. Considered from such an angle, the written word acquires a sinister and troubling additional dimension.
To be sure, the premise of the show may ring a few bells. The concept of a poisoned ink that could kill readers of a manuscript powered a 1980 bestseller by Umberto Eco. And over the past few years the Poison Book Project, a collaboration between the Winterthur Library and the University of Delaware, has identified hundreds of surviving 19th-century volumes that employed emerald green, a toxic, arsenic-based pigment that was also widely used in wallpaper and children’s toys.
Armed with new technologies and attentive to the recent academic emphasis upon materiality, art historians and conservators have literally and figuratively thrown new light on a wide range of scrolls and codices.