Literary quarantine: National Library of France removes books believed to be laced with arsenic
Four books have been quarantined in the National Library of France. Here’s why. Warning: Spoilers for the book and film 'The Name of the Rose'.
Remember Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film The Name of the Rose, based on Umberto Eco’s historical mystery novel of the same name?
In it, a Franciscan friar William of Baskerville (Sean Connery) heads to an abbey northern Italy to investigate a mysterious death – which turns into a series of untimely demises – linked to Aristotle’s "Second Book of Poetics", which describes how comedy can be used to teach.
Believing jocularity to be instruments of the Devil, some devious bastard (we won’t spoil that part here) poisons the pages to stop the spread of dangerous ideas, and those reading the book would ingest the poison as they licked their fingers to turn the pages.
Indeed, not one but four books have been removed from France’s national library (which contains a collection of more than 16 million books), over concerns that their covers may be laced with poison. Arsenic, to be precise.
