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Killer Reads: Toxic Books at the Walters

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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.

Installation view of If Books Could Kill at WAM, Photograph by Kerr Houston

This new show, though, offers a clever and compellingly tight introduction to the topic of poisonous manuscripts. Co-curated by Lynley Anne Herbert, Abigail Quandt, and Annette S. Ortiz Miranda, it features 22 historical objects and four (safely enclosed) samples of the offensive materials. And while it fills a single room on the museum’s third floor, the show is emphatically inclusive, as the samples on display range from medieval to modern and represent five continents. Spend a mere half hour here, and you’ll have covered some serious ground.

A treatise produced in Thailand in 1824 stands in the center of the room and acts as a sort of distillation of the show’s logic. It’s open to a lively image of an elephant that is painted in lead white, surrounded by vivid mercury-based vermilion, and framed by a brilliant golden yellow derived from arsenic. In short, it’s a toxic brew, and a stark reminder that the most intense colors have often been made of potentially hazardous metals and minerals.

Three related exhibits develop that idea, offering varied and consistently interesting instances of these ingredients in play. One focuses on cinnabar, or mercury sulfide, which yielded the lush red in Pompeiian wall paintings, carved Chinese lacquer—and, here, the bleeding hands of the crucified Christ, in a Book of Hours produced in Belgium around 1460.

It’s easy to see why contemporary artists’ handbooks endorsed the vibrant pigment. But it’s just as troubling to learn that mercury sulfide can impair the speech and weaken the muscles of those who interact with it routinely, such as any faithful readers who touched and kissed these images.

And touch they did. Nearby, an Armenian gospel made in 1455 includes a picture of four men surrounding Jesus during his betrayal by Judas. The gesturing onlookers were originally shown wearing hats painted in cinnabar. But as the curators note, a later and apparently judgmental reader violently defaced the four figures, scraping the paint from the page—and thus risking a hazardous encounter with mercury. Clearly, even inert images were potent, in more senses than one.

Mors (Death), from a Belgian confession book, c. 1819, Walters Art Museum
The theme of this show is thus clear: attention to toxic materials can heighten our appreciation of their histories, while also allowing institutions like the Walters to treat them as responsibly as possible.
Kerr Houston

A second display concentrates on arsenic, which was used to produce both orpiment (a rich mustard yellow) and emerald green. Orpiment, which was employed by the ancient Egyptians, was long known to be poisonous, but its visual appeal consistently led artists to ignore the possible side effects (which can include skin lesions and cancer).

Emerald green, by contrast, was developed only in 1814, by German chemists, but it soon appeared in pesticides and in a wide range of household items. Following a wave of reported hallucinations, illnesses and deaths, Queen Victoria ordered the green wallpapers at Buckingham Palace removed, and the pigment was eventually discontinued.

Look through the glass, though, and it’s easy to sense the allure of both colors. An elegant stack of volumes comprising the works of Virgil, produced in 1816, boasts emerald green covers—the only bindings in the Walters collection known to contain the pigment. Nearby, two confession books created in the early 1800s feature images of the Virgin Mary and of Death hovering over the slumped body of a corpse pierced by an arrow.

Created by deaf Belgian students and purchased in 2023 by the Walters, they are remarkable objects in general. But they acquire an additional pathos when we realize that the Virgin’s crown is colored with orpiment and that the dead man’s jacket is rendered in emerald green. Apparently, the line between beauty and suffering has long been thin.

That idea also hovers over the several examples decorated with lead-based pigments. The perils of lead, of course, are well known. But artists have long prized it for its low cost, its flexibility, and its ability to yield bright, opaque whites. A gorgeous 15th-century French missal testifies to that appeal, but it’s a later manuscript, produced in 1906 by the talented illustrator Clothilde Coulaux, that will likely take your breath away. To obtain a more consistent surface, Coulaux coated entire pages in lead white, yielding a densely physical object that almost glows. Ghastly but weighty, pure but perilous, the surface is memorably eerie.

It’s also quite well preserved, which is more than one can say about some of the objects on display. As the curators point out, in a final section of the show, paper and parchment attract a range of pests; as a result, older texts are regularly pocked with the tunnels and traces of various larvae.

Clothilde Coulaux, the Clothilde Missal, 1906, Walters Art Museum

A leaf from a Qur’an likely dating to the 800s illustrates the phenomenon in both concrete and poetic terms. Marred by sizable holes, it’s barely legible in places. But, readable or not, it conveys a central assertion of the Qur’an, made in the Surah al-’Asr: that the passage of time frequently leads to loss.

Naturally, artists and conservators have tried for centuries to stem such damage, and several items in the show document the dangerous measures sometimes taken. A 16th-century Safavid codex takes what you might call the organic route, invoking the natural properties of kabikaj, a poisonous plant, to repel hungry insects.

By contrast, a Baroque Mexican text carries a record of its disinfection by means of fumigation, and a 1788 prayerbook features a subtle layer of lead arsenate, a pesticide developed in the 1890s and sometimes applied to books as a preservative. Such examples hint at a lengthy struggle, conducted with increasingly aggressive chemicals.

Happily, though, conservators have an increasingly flexible range of tools at their disposal, and can now work in controlled environments instead of risking contact with noxious compounds. A short video featuring Annette S. Ortiz Miranda, a conservation scientist at the Walters, explains how she uses X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to identify hazardous materials. (Of course, the tool can be used towards other ends, as well; recently, Penn State researchers employed a similar technology to identify the presence of Mayan blue in Baroque frescoes in Mexico.)

The theme of this show is thus clear: attention to toxic materials can heighten our appreciation of their histories, while also allowing institutions like the Walters to treat them as responsibly as possible.

And in that sense, the show is utterly successful. Concise but organized around compelling examples, it makes its central points clearly and effectively. At a few moments, admittedly, the wall texts drift into unnecessarily speculative territory. For instance, the curators point out that Coulaux died at the age of 53: was this possibly, they ask, a premature death caused by exposure to dangerous materials? Well, perhaps… but given that average life expectancy in France at the time of her birth was about 44 years, it hardly seems likely. In any event, visitors to this show will gain a heightened sense of the critical role played by unsafe materials in the lengthy history of manuscript and book manufacture.

Or, we might add, the larger history of culture, generally. For, after all, scribes and painters were far from the only folks who worked with dangerous chemicals, or in hazardous conditions. So did the miners who extracted the lead, the tanners who risked chemical burns in using lime to cure animal skins, and the paper millers who relied on chlorine compounds in bleaching their product.

In a sense, the history of communication has always also been a history of calculated risk. And it still is. Today, there are more than 18 billion mobile devices in circulation; most of them were made using toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury, and lead, or brominated fire retardants.

Letters on a page or characters on a screen can thus seem tidy, benign, and transparent. But behind them stands a complex story of risk and danger, and a hard-won, persevering commitment to both form and meaning. To something that, in the best of cases, might fairly be called beautiful.

Installation view of If Books Could Kill at WAM, Photograph by Kerr Houston
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