Libraries and rare book collections often carry volumes that feature poisons on their pages, from famous murder mysteries to seminal works on toxicology and forensics. The poisons described in these books are merely words on a page, but some books scattered throughout the world are literally poisonous.
These toxic books, produced in the 19th century, are bound in vivid cloth colored with a notorious pigment known as emerald green that’s laced with arsenic. Many of them are going unnoticed on shelves and in collections. So Melissa Tedone, the lab head for library materials conservation at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware, has launched an effort dubbed the Poison Book Project to locate and catalogue these noxious volumes.
What makes things really challenging is that the universe does a good job misleading us with what appears to be simplicity. The ground is down there; space—which has no grains as far as we can see—is up there; time moves forward. The trick for all of us, physicists included, is not learning new truths but unlearning old falsehoods. Galileo Galilei’s seminal book, which explained the motion of the earth, is perhaps history’s best example of that process.
“It’s meant to convince you that the earth goes around the sun and that the earth rotates,” Rovelli says. “But what’s remarkable is that the actual arguments for the earth moving take a few pages. Most of the book is devoted to trying to bring the reader out from the obvious conviction that that’s impossible.”
One answer is that contemporary popular culture loves familiar successes—witness the current fad for remakes, reboots and the ever-expanding superhero “universes”. Child was wildly popular, with a literary and television career spanning the 20th century’s last four decades. Studios and publishers imagine that she has legions of fans who will eagerly watch and read anything about her.
But that is too cynical by half. The real answer is that Child lived a bold and eventful life, capacious enough to offer nostalgia to those who remember her and inspiration to those who do not. In effect, she was a populariser of French cuisine—but that carries the implication that she somehow diluted it for the masses. In fact, her recipes are not simple or dumbed down: they are clear.
I was sure I’d have plenty to learn, not only about Dylan, but also about myself and why I have such a personal attachment and urgent need to hang around his universe. I wonder if he understands and contemplates the major effect he has on people. Not the wackos who stalk him at hotels or want to work in his gift shop, but the masses who quietly marvel at his music and always stick up for his voice when others say it sounds like a leaky sewer pipe about to burst at the seams.
Still, no one writes the minutiae of life like Stibbe, and here she has delivered a captivating portrait of friendship that is as tender as it is funny.
A married woman could not sign a contract, nor draw up a will. She had no debts — which sounds great, until you realize that she could not owe money, because all her money, even that she earned herself, belonged to her husband, as did all her possessions. As did her children.
That this changed was in part due to the heroic campaigning, and the tragic story, of Caroline Norton, as conveyed in Fraser’s new book.