Libraries Destroyed This Book So It Wouldn’t Destroy You | Tales From the Bottle

This is a book even the library doesn’t want you reading – because it’s bad for your health.

“Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers is an 1874 book by Dr. Robert C. Kedzie (1823–1902) of Michigan.
The book warns of the dangers of then-commonly used arsenic-pigmented wallpaper. It is an essay by Kedzie that introduces an album of 86 samples of toxic wallpapers. The book itself contains a dangerous concentration of arsenic compounds. The successful campaign against arsenical wallpapers urged by the book, along with the dangerous amount of the poison contained in the volume has led to the destruction of the vast majority of its original print run. Only five of the original 100 copies currently survive; the other 95 copies were deaccessioned and destroyed by the libraries who were its original recipients. The surviving copies may only be handled with special precautions.
As of 2026, the remaining copies were held at Harvard University Medical School, the U.S. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland (two copies), and the university libraries of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. One of the copies in the National Library of Medicine has been digitized and is freely available online.”

More on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_from_the_Walls_of_Death

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