>We digress, but Bill Hagen notes:
>>
>>"Never considered books as carriers. Do remember
reading an article about
>>how very old books sometimes have mold containing
hallucinogens
>(seriously)."
>
>For those interested, I do believe the original
research on this topic
>was published in the old, venerable, British medical
journal _Lancet_ in
>the last year or so. Perhaps a crime writer out there
could work this
>in (a collecter disoriented and hallucinating from
book mold commits
>some horrible crime or some such).
Then there's the white arsenic that people used to sift
between book pages
to kill silverfish... I've always wanted to use that in a
story, but it's
probably a mystery device as old as the genre itself. It's
also as good an
argument as any to *wash your hands* after handling
antiquarian books.
I recall a (Nero Wolfe?) story about someone dying after
getting a paper
cut from a poisoned book. No idea what it was, though.
Anybody?
Oh, yes, and there's "Dugan/Dubin the Magician," the supposed
children's
story about the beheaded sorcerer who poisons an evil king
from beyond the
grave, using a strychnine-soaked book.
Kathy
Katherine Harper
Department of English
Bowling Green State University
kharper@bgnet.bgsu.edu
Visit the W.R. Burnett Page at http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~kharper/
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