To modern eyes, the Victorians displayed a number of toxic traits—not least of which was a penchant for poisoning themselves. After a long day of applying lead-based cosmetics and eating adulterated bread, a person of the 1800s might kick back under the indoor gas lamp with a brilliant green book bound in arsenic-dyed cloth. A sickening number of these volumes are still in circulation today—posing a potential health hazard to librarians and researchers who handle them frequently. Today we’re talking about the Poison Books Project, an initiative of the Winterthur Library and the University of Delaware. The PBP identifies and catalogs books bound with toxic pigments and offers safety tips for those who work with them. Enjoy this to-dye-for new #brattlecast—and learn more about the Poison Books Project here.
Brattlecast #187 - Something from I. Newton
In this episode we’re looking at a foundational text of modern math and science, Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The volume with us today is a beautifully bound third edition, published in 1726 (a first edition, worth millions, would have probably stayed back at the shop, although Ken does describe an electric encounter with Newton’s own annotated copy). Concerned that these laws of motion might be too easy to understand? Don’t worry, the book is also written in Latin. We’ll round out the episode with a chat about more recent collectible math books—and take an interesting digression into the history of the dust jacket—on this dynamic new #brattlecast.
Brattlecast #87 - The Descent of Man
In 1859 Charles Darwin published one of the most influential, and controversial, books ever written: The Origin of the Species. Twelve years later, his follow up, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, in which he applied his theory of evolution to human reproduction, would prove to be equally shocking and transformative. We’ll take a look at a first edition copy of The Descent of Man, explore some of the questionable ideas it would launch, and trace the evolution of these naturalist classics as they were published in hundreds of different editions from the 1800s to the present day.