Can Books Kill?

[00:00:00] Karena Ingram, host: Welcome to Free Admissions, the Walters Art Museum podcast where we bring art and people of every background together to inspire creativity, curiosity, and connection. I’m your host, Karena Ingram, and today we’re channeling the energy of every great true crime podcast as we investigate the question, “Can books kill?”

We’ll speak with our curator Lynley Herbert, conservation scientist Annette Ortiz Miranda, and conservator Abigail Quandt about our newest and deadliest manuscript exhibition, If Books Could Kill. Then, love is in the air. Let’s learn more about the artworks that steal the hearts of our visitors with Teresa Norman, our Audience Insight Analyst.

No tickets needed. Free Admissions starts now.

[00:00:46] Karena Ingram, host: They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Well, our latest manuscript exhibition proves that to be true, but not quite in the way you’d expect. Today, opening a paperback from any bookstore is a safe thing to do, but for hundreds of years, simply touching the pages of certain books could have devastating consequences to a person’s health.

That’s because it was common practice for scribes, artists, and bookbinders to use highly toxic materials such as lead, arsenic, and mercury in the creation of handmade books. If Books Could Kill casts light on the hidden dangers of two dozen books within the Walters’ rich collection and reveals the delicate science behind identifying those toxic materials and handling them safely. On view through August 3rd, 2025, this exhibition exposes how the toxic materials used to paint manuscript illuminations and treat books for pests span cultures, geographies, and time periods.

In the fall of 2023, it was discovered that a book that was set to be displayed in a different exhibition had been covered in arsenic to protect it from bookworms and other insects. This discovery led one of our curators, conservators, and conservation scientists on a scavenger hunt through the Walters’ existing collection.

As they looked more closely at the manuscripts, they found other dangerous substances within their pages. A 19th-century confession book made by a deaf student in Belgium was painted with a vibrant green pigment containing arsenic. An Armenian gospel book from 1455 was illuminated with intense red vermilion derived from mercury-rich cinnabar. Lead white paint gave the pages of a 1906 French missal a creamy hue. And a Thai treatise on elephants from 1824 contained all three of these dangerous pigments.

These beautiful yet toxic colors, along with invisible chemicals used on book bindings to protect them from bookworms, came with a price—one that was often paid by the book’s creators and users, who were unknowingly exposed to these substances.

These works illustrate the value folks place on the beauty of color in manuscripts. A bright green coloring known by many names, including emerald green, Scheele’s green, and Paris green, was invented in 1775 from a compound containing arsenic. It became the era’s most fashionable color and was widely used in everything from fabric dye and wallpaper to children’s toys. Its toxic effects quickly became apparent, leading to many illnesses and deaths. However, the hue was still sought after and the coloring wasn’t officially banned in the U.S. until 1960.

Through their research, our curator, conservator, and conservation scientist also gained a better understanding of what to look out for so that they can take precautions to protect their health when handling potentially toxic tomes. Now they wear gloves and masks when handling works of this nature and test any works they suspect of containing a toxic substance. Thankfully, I’m happy to report that the majority of the manuscripts in the museum’s existing collection pose no risk, and the works on view in If Books Could Kill are not harmful to the visitors.

If Books Could Kill provides visitors with insight into an intriguing, little-discussed topic while highlighting the important, behind-the-scenes collaborative work the show necessitated.

[00:03:52] Karena Ingram, host: To help answer the question, “Can books kill?”, let’s turn to the creators of this fascinating manuscript exhibition—the team I lovingly refer to as the Walters Investigation Unit: Lynley Herbert, Annette Ortiz Miranda, and Abigail Quandt.

Welcome to the podcast.

[00:04:06] Lynley Herbert: Thank you for having us.

[00:04:07] Abigail Quandt: Thank you.

[00:04:07] Annette Ortiz Miranda: Thank you.

[00:04:08] Karena Ingram, host: Of course. Before we dive into talking about this really, really cool exhibition-I’m very excited if you couldn’t tell-so our listeners can match a voice to a name, could you all share your names, your titles, and how long you’ve been at the Walters?

[00:04:21] Lynley Herbert: Sure, I’ll start. So I’m Lynley Anne Herbert. I’m the Robert and Nancy Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Walters, and I’ve been here 15 years.

[00:04:30] Annette Ortiz Miranda: I am Annette Ortiz Miranda. I am the Conservation Scientist here at the Walters Art Museum, and I’ve been here for a year and eight months.

[00:04:37] Abigail Quandt: And I’m Abigail Quandt, Senior Conservator of Manuscripts and Rare Books, as well as Head of Book and Paper Conservation. And I’ve been at the Walters for 40 years.

[00:04:46] Karena Ingram, host: Wow, incredible.

I’m so excited to talk about this exhibition because of how unique it is in looking at, you know, these toxic materials that are in books and thinking about art objects in these ways. I told Lynley this earlier, I’ve secretly been calling you all the Walters Investigation Unit because of the work that you’ve done on this exhibition.

And I know I’m not the only one who’s curious about how you all came to conceive this project. And so I’m curious to know how If Books Could Kill came to be from your perspectives.

[00:05:19] Lynley Herbert: So for me, the very first manuscript I ever acquired as a curator here at the Walters was the Clothilde Missal. And I acquired that in 2016, and when we got the book in our hands, I noticed that the book was strangely heavy for a tiny book.

And then we were trying to figure out what the pages were made of, and we couldn’t actually tell by looking at them, and we thought that was strange. And Abigail started looking at it under a microscope and discovered that the pages were completely covered with white lead. And that was actually contributing to the weight of the book, but also it occurred to us that the woman who made the book, Clothilde, was exposing herself to lead every day that she was working on this manuscript.

And that seemed like a really interesting, but also a really strange phenomenon. And so, that was something that I tucked away and thought, like, this was a story that we really need to tell. And this seemed like a perfect way to kind of start to think more about that and to share it with our public.

[00:06:14] Annette Ortiz Miranda: To me, because I’ve been here for way less time than Lynley and Abigail, it was a new or recently acquired rare book. I think it’s gonna be on display. It’s the W960. That’s how we call it. And the book came to the lab because Lynley has a question about a weird green color in some of the illustrations, and at the end, there was never a green color.

The areas were never meant to be green, but it was actually gold. It was a metal alloy that degraded and it turned into this green kind of material. But then I found some unusual amounts of arsenic, and then lead in different areas of the book that were not colored. And that was absolutely weird. After long discussions and research, we discovered that it was a pesticide, and that was an unexpected finding and to me that was kind of the trigger for this idea.

[00:07:06] Abigail Quandt: So, I think that Lynley was just describing the Clothilde Missal, and certainly that is something that I thought was very interesting, and we discovered, actually, we have another 19th-century manuscript in the collection that was also illuminated on a parchment that was coated with lead white. I think this is something that needs to be shared globally, because, of course, these manuscripts are all around the world in different collections.

[00:07:31] Karena Ingram, host: Mm hmm.

[00:07:31] Abigail Quandt: And the curators or librarians, especially, are unlikely to be aware of the risks that they face. So I think when we first made this discovery, it sort of planted the seed for both Lynley and me to not only share this information to the public at large, but also just look at other materials in the collection that may also have hazardous materials that needed sort of careful handling.

[00:07:58] Karena Ingram, host: And I think taking that curiosity of these books, and like, “What is this? What am I actually looking at?”, and displaying your findings, that kind of transparency, I think visitors are really looking forward to seeing from this exhibition. Really knowing the behind the scenes work that you all do in trying to keep people as safe as possible, which is very important.

This exhibition will segment out different types of materials that are found in the manuscripts that you’ve selected. Some focusing on vermilion, you’ve talked about lead white. Can you talk more about the toxic materials that are commonly found in these rare books and manuscripts and why they were used in the first place?

[00:08:32] Abigail Quandt: Sure. When we’re talking about manuscripts, that is books written and painted by hand, the majority of the materials that have some toxicity to humans are pigments. So these are pigments that were used to illuminate the manuscript, to decorate the borders, etcetera. Three heavy metals that were typically found in medieval pigments are lead, mercury, and arsenic.

They have different levels of toxicity, but they’re all pretty, pretty darn toxic in terms of the risk to the people who are actually making these books. But there are more modern pigments used in manuscripts and also paintings that contain other materials that may not be quite so toxic, but still you have chromium and other metals that could be risky for somebody to handle.

In the realm of rare printed books and bindings, there’s been some research done in the last several years at the Winterthur Museum focusing on specifically bindings that were colored with very toxic pigments. And so there’s been an effort to share that information internationally and make people aware of the risks involved in handling these brightly colored but very toxic bindings.

[00:09:44] Karena Ingram, host: You had also mentioned earlier, some of these toxins, you can find out what they are just by looking at them, versus others that you might not learn until you conduct certain tests to figure out, okay, what is this toxic material? And how do we deal with it? How is a conservator or conservation scientist able to tell if a book is toxic, how it is toxic and what best practices to take?

[00:10:06] Annette Ortiz Miranda: So, yes, as you mentioned, some of these pigments can be easily identified by just looking closely at the books and the manuscripts. And, for example, orpiment and vermilion and lead white, they have these very characteristic particles, a wave of dispersion that you can tell. But sometimes it’s not that easy, especially when they’re mixed with other colors, because we’re talking about these pigments as pure materials, but they’re often not used like that.

They’re, most of the cases, they’re mixed with many other things, the binder and other colors. So luckily, the Walters is one of the museums in the United States with a well-equipped scientific lab, and we have multiple different

[pieces of] equipment that we can use to characterize materials. We can identify the components of the materials used in the collection, not just books and manuscripts.

One of the most common techniques used is called XRF, which is an x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and it works with x-rays and is noninvasive. It causes no damage to the artworks and it’s really fast. Like, I think the measurement would take me like two minutes.

[00:11:11] Karena Ingram, host: Wow.

[00:11:11] Annette Ortiz Miranda: And I can tell you by looking at a graph the kind of elements and metals present on that object.

And then I can say, “Oh, so yeah, we have like high amounts of lead, we have a high amounts of mercury.” And it’s not only useful to identify pigments, but also other things that we cannot see or not projectable to the naked eye, like pesticides, sometimes in the case of inorganic pesticide, which means that they’re made out of heavy metals and not made out of plants, for example.

So, we have the capacity to identify those materials and then we share our results with the other members of the staff that are responsible for handling these objects like Abigail, and Lynley, and also our art handlers, and other personnel in the museum.

[00:11:52] Karena Ingram, host: And I’m glad that you touched on that because you all are most familiar and very intimate with these toxic books.

How do you go about protecting yourselves? I know we have a very robust safety and health plan and I do want to make that note that we do have protocol here, but I want to hear from you all. How do you go about protecting yourselves while handling these books, especially when preparing for an exhibition?

[00:12:13] Abigail Quandt: Well, I can start by summarizing the procedures that have been in place for a long time for handling rare books and manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum. So, in other institutions, they insist that the users and librarians wear gloves, but we have found for many years that it’s actually much safer if you handle the books with very clean, bare hands and not with gloves because your tactile sense is much more sensitive and it’s easier and safer to turn pages with ungloved hands than if you had gloves on.

So, it’s always been the practice for over 60 or more years to handle the books with clean hands. And then we make custom book boxes to store the books and protect them during storage. Obviously, once we discover that something is especially toxic, for example, the manuscript that Annette mentioned that had the lead arsenate pesticide, we use a very different approach, and so I’ll let Annette explain exactly what that is.

[00:13:21] Annette Ortiz Miranda: Yeah, so in that particular case, we, of course, you need to wear gloves when you’re handling this book. We store them in boxes, especially those that are extremely fragile. We label these boxes. On top of that, we have databases where we store everything related to the objects. So, there will be a red flag in there where we can actually include some text and then with the suggested steps that you need to follow in order to handle that object or that book.

A database is one of the first places where the staff responsible for handling the collection will go. This includes registered art handlers, conservators, curators, and even me. And then on top of that, we also have something called D-Wipes that we will use to wipe the areas that were in contact with the object. These D-Wipes, they have a certain pH that can trap the particles, the heavy metal particles, in case they’re released from the object. They have multiple uses. For example, dentists use them in their offices too.

But there is a step that I insist, no matter what you do, is that you do not touch your face, do not touch anything while you’re handling an object that was identified as toxic or possible danger. And always wash your hands with water and soap before and after handling the object.

[00:14:40] Karena Ingram, host: I feel like that’s a great life rule for everything. It’s very fitting. I have to ask this because you all have probably seen countless manuscripts and books in your careers and we’ve talked so much about pigments. We talked a little bit about pesticides. What is the weirdest thing that you’ve probably found in a book?

[00:14:59] Abigail Quandt: Well, let’s see, thinking back in terms of what I found in our own manuscripts here at the Walters. I don’t think I’ve ever run across anything that’s identifiably toxic. Um, it’s more sort of innocuous materials that happen to either crawl into the book. So insects that get trapped and then squashed. So that’s always very interesting.

And usually if we can, we just leave it in place. Record it, but leave it in place. Other things that one might come across, not so much in our manuscripts, but maybe in other printed books, would be pieces of plants or flowers that the owners of the books would have collected and pressed inside the pages.

Again, those aren’t harmful. But then there’s all kinds of stuff that falls into the gutter, meaning the fold of the book in between the pages, and one can find pieces of it. Like bits of human hair, little tiny seed particles or particles of pollen, which are very interesting because they could be analyzed and used to determine where the book had been used and what kind of plants were nearby.

You know, all kinds of other debris that’s interesting to somebody who was curious about where the book was and how it had been used. But I can’t say off the top of my head that I’ve ever found anything particularly toxic inside the pages of the book.

[00:16:24] Karena Ingram, host: Oh, that’s good! But also it adds another layer to the story of each of these books and manuscripts too, which I think is fascinating to think about.

[00:16:34] Abigail Quandt: Yeah.

[00:16:34] Karena Ingram, host: And when you think about the artists who were making these books and gravitating towards these very vibrant and vivid colors to paint with, not knowing the harm that they were exposing themselves to.

When you think about the future, especially the future of art making, do you foresee any changes in how conservators might address or handle new toxic materials that people are probably using commonly today, or considering certain advances in technology or safety measures when it comes to conservation in general, truly?

[00:17:04] Annette Ortiz Miranda: I think in conservation, the awareness of hazards beside the pigments is becoming more and more common and like talk in the community. For example, this was just pure casualty. After we discovered the lead arsenide pesticide in the book-I think Lynley, remind me, you acquired how many months before I arrived?

[00:17:26] Lynley Herbert: Like, not too many.

[00:17:28] Annette Ortiz Miranda: A fun story, that book was going on display in an exhibition. I can’t remember the name of the show.

[00:17:34] Lynley Herbert: New on the Bookshelf, as a new acquisition.

[00:17:37] Annette Ortiz Miranda: You see, and then…

[00:17:37] Lynley Herbert: Like five days later, it was supposed to go on view.

[00:17:39] Annette Ortiz Miranda: Yes. And there I am, like a month after I’m hired saying, like, “No, the book cannot go on display,” and dreaming to keep my job.

Okay. And then, so, after that happened, then I discovered there was a conference happening in D.C., which is nearby, hosted by the Smithsonian, called the Safety Summit. And it was focused on talking about different hazards and how to handle the different and many hazards that you can find in museum collections in the entire country.

You can see other collections where they have to store pharmaceutical products and things like that, they’re like another level of hazard that we’re lucky we don’t have here, and happy. So after having that book with review together with the current steps that we were doing after a book was acquired, for example, when you get a new gift or an accession, then the object will go into a quarantine for pests.

And then after that, it will continue the way through the museum towards the conservator or the curator. Or in this case, in case of books, it will come to the rare books library. So we decided that it was time to include a new step on that process. And it was like, after the quarantine for pests, then the book or the object, in some cases where there is a suspicion that there may be a toxic material on them, will come to the lab for a quick check.

Remember I said there’s two minutes, so let’s say five, because I need to set everything up. And I would check and make sure they’re not inorganic pesticides. And then the book will continue his ways towards the next location.

So, I think we presented this approach into this event into the conference in D.C. and the audience was very happy and, like, welcoming and I got a lot of feedback like that is a great idea because we keep collecting things and then we really don’t know, and you sometimes, you cannot see them just simply can’t see it.

So, I think this is something that other museums with scientific equipment available can adopt and will in the future. But in terms of what artists are using, we can’t control that.

[00:19:42] Karena Ingram, host: Yeah. Only time will tell.

[00:19:44] Lynley Herbert: Exactly.

[00:19:45] Karena Ingram, host: I think that this exhibition is really unique in that we are fortunate to have a curator, conservator, and conservation scientist sharing their own perspectives on these books and their findings, and I wanna hear from you all what you hope visitors will take away from, what you’ve contributed in this exhibition.

[00:20:04] Lynley Herbert: From my perspective as a curator, I’m usually focused on showing beautiful things and telling fun stories. So, usually I’m focusing in on what the image represents in the books. And I think that this is a wonderful opportunity to kind of pull back the curtain and kind of show people something more about the sort of hidden side of book production and what people were exposing themselves to and, like, going through to create these beautiful objects that people usually just enjoy on an aesthetic level.

[00:20:30] Annette Ortiz Miranda: I think I would like the visitors to go away with an appreciation for the beauty of the objects and also for the complexity behind the preservation of the object on display and also to be mindful of touching and kissing things.

[00:20:44] Abigail Quandt: I mean, everybody has books at home, and many people inherit old books from family members. And often I get phone calls or emails, you know, about the family Bible or this, that, and the other. So, I think that certainly, I think this show will be of interest to visitors who have these types of books in their home and are trying to preserve them as best as possible and just to be aware of certain risks and what precautions they might consider taking.

I mean, I can’t imagine that a lot of people have illuminated manuscripts at home, but you never know. Somebody might have like a single leaf or fragment, you know, that I picked up somewhere. Also, I think the show is a great opportunity to just highlight the work that all three areas do because I think that it’s a lot of behind the scenes work.

There’s not necessarily a public awareness of the type of collaboration that goes on between curatorial, conservation, conservation science. So, I think that’s my hope that people will understand and appreciate and just enjoy the information that we were sharing in the show.

[00:21:50] Karena Ingram, host: Absolutely. Well, thank you three for taking your time to talk more about If Books Could Kill.

I have one last question: Can books actually kill?

[00:21:59] Abigail Quandt: It depends!

[00:22:02] Karena Ingram, host: Thanks, everyone.

Thanks so much, Lynley, Annette, and Abigail. You can see If Books Could Kill in our Manuscript Gallery on Level 3. We’ve talked a lot about deadly toxins and the macabre truths of old manuscripts, but with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, let’s round out this episode on a more heartwarming note.

Each February, visitors of the Walters Art Museum can literally like their favorite artwork in the museum during Hearts for Art. To learn more about this fun tradition, here’s Teresa Norman.

[00:22:42] Teresa Norman: Hello, my name is Teresa Norman, and I am the Audience Insights Analyst at the Walters. I’ve been working at the Walters for two years. So, my job is to collect data from our visitors and assess their experiences at the museum. One of my favorite yearly activities is called Hearts for Art, and it’s a program that we run every February right around Valentine’s Day.

We invite visitors to pick up a heart from the visitor experience desk at the start of their trip and to place it on the ground in front of their favorite piece of artwork or object during their visit. After the week of Valentine’s Day, my team goes around the museum and logs where all the hearts were placed.

We then analyze the data and get to share out the trends about what was the most loved pieces of that year. Hearts for Art is a program that is run nationally at a variety of museums and was originally run at the Walters from 2015 to 2017. When I started here in January of 2023, one of my first tasks was restarting this project.

Doing this in 2023 and 2024 has been so fun because it has allowed us to compare trends to the past and to see a shift in what our visitors are interested in. Looking at past data, we found that mummies and religious artworks featured heavily in where visitors placed their hearts in 2015 and 2016.

However, in the past two years, one of the big trends that we’ve identified is that visitors are moved by our temporary exhibitions that bring contemporary art. In 2023, visitors placed 396 hearts before 209 works of art. The temporary installation Activating the Renaissance got a lot of love. That year, Stephen Towne’s painting Are You Being Served and Jessica Bastita’s painting Tears of the Black Madonna were two of the most popular pieces, along with a stone menorah from Syria carved between the 4th and 6th century A.D.

In 2024, we almost doubled the amount of hearts in the museum. With 747 hearts spread across 296 works of art in 2024, two of the contemporary artworks installed in Ethiopia at the Crossroads: a painting titled All In One by Aïda Muluneh; a video, Brave New World 2, by Theo Chetu; along with one of our newer acquisitions, the stained glass piece Saint Amelie by Kehinde Wiley, were all in our top three most hearted works. And between these two years, it’s really interesting to see that it is consistently colorful, contemporary artworks featuring people of color that have been juxtaposed with our historic art and objects that garner the most hearts.

Through our other research we have conducted with visitors, we’ve learned that what these juxtapositions do is bring the historic art and objects into dialogue between the past and the present, and visitors consider them in a new light. It helps people think about and connect to historic art and objects differently, and that is really exciting.

My favorite work of art that I placed my heart by last year was the Chrysanthemum Bowl on the fourth floor in our Across Asia exhibit. This piece is one of my favorite pieces because Across Asia opened up very soon after I started working here at the Walters, and it was the first time I’d ever heard the words “plique-à-jour,” which is the word for the enameling process that’s done to create such a beautiful and intricate artwork. So, that got my heart last year.

[00:26:15] Karena Ingram, host: Thanks so much, Teresa. Stop by the Walters between February 12th through 16th to drop a heart for your favorite artwork. You can visit TheWalters.org/events to learn more.

Free access to the Walters Art Museum online and in person is made possible through the combined generosity of individual donors, foundations, corporations, and grants from the City of Baltimore, Maryland State Arts Council, Citizens of Baltimore County, Howard County Government, and Howard County Arts Council. To learn more about engaging with or supporting the Walters, visit TheWalters.org/Give

A big thanks to Lynley Herbert, Annette Ortiz Miranda, Abigail Quandt, and Teresa Norman for chatting with us today. Free Admissions, the Walters art museum podcast is made possible by Marketing and Communications Director Connie McAllister, Communications Managers Sydney Adamson, Head of Graphic Design Tony Venne, Graphic Designer Rachel Minier, Web Specialist Dylan Kinnett, Content Writer Erin Branigan, IT Specialist Frank Dickerson, and edited and hosted by me, Karena Ingram.

We hope you enjoyed this episode! If you did, please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends. You can visit TheWalters.Org for more information and to plan your visit. Hope to see you at the museum soon!