Evidence stacks up for poisonous books containing toxic dyes

A funny coincidence about this being from Lipscomb University: there's a British historian called Suzannah Lipscomb, who's done some documentaries. In one of them (I think it's 'Hidden Killers of the Victorian Home'), she talked about this exact topic!

The full doco should be available on YouTube if you search for it. There's a couple of YT channels that licence them, although sometimes they give them odd names.

I have several books printed in the late Victorian era and they are the most beautiful books I own.

They have brilliant colored plates which have not faded over time, they're printed onto excellent high quality paper and the letterpress is some of the sharpest printing I've ever seen. Compared with today's books these once almost-everyday items are works of art.

I'm not denying that most of the dyes used in their production are likely toxic, and I'd reckon there's no shortage of As and Cr in the brilliant greens and yellow/orange dyes.

What I'm whingeing about is that whilst printing tech is likely safer these days the presentation has gone backwards in the 140 or so years since my books were published.

Fact is safe dye chemistry just hasn't caught up, neither has the horrible smudgy low resolution offset printing we see these days.

Apologists will offer every excuse under the sun why we can't have lovely books like those printed in the late Victorian era but the fact is we actually don't have them!

When it comes to book publishing industrial dye chemistry has failed us.

(I could go on to whinge about the pathetically inadequate range of blue dyes in use today but that's a discussion for a chemistry forum.)