When I first trawled through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's essay collection Through the Magic Door in search of article-inspiring material, I noticed that there were many references to the colour green. After taking time out to create a whole string of articles about this colour using material from other sources, I returned to the Magic Door to have another look at the green items.
Conan Doyle several times invites visitors to his library to make themselves comfortable on his old green settee while he talks them through his book collection, many volumes of which have green covers.
This may seem harmless enough, but I recently found some unexpected and alarming information: it is not just green shirts and green kirtles that have both good and bad aspects and associations, green book covers do too.
Conan Doyle knows how just looking at the cover of an old book can trigger associations and trains of thought and bring back fond memories of what is inside.
He says this about the books in his library in general:
“There is not a tattered cover which does not bring its mellow memories to me.”
He says this about a book of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe:
“And all this didactic talk comes from looking at that old green cover of Poe.”
He calls his books his noble, silent comrades, his dear personal friends, and is very grateful for what they have done for him:
“...and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past.”
He is not the only one to feel this way; I felt very nostalgic after looking at an online image of the old green cover of the copy of Treasure Island that I once owned.
Conan Doyle has a lot to say about Sir Walter Scott and his works, which he thought very highly of. He makes several references to his collection of books by Scott; he mentions a line of olive-green volumes and the long green ranks of the Waverley novels.
Here are a few early-edition volumes from the Waverley series:
While green book covers may have had only good and positive associations for Conan Doyle, some of them are actually dangerous.
Some 19th-century books were bound with a toxic pigment known as emerald green or Paris green. The bright green cloth covers contain arsenic!
I wonder whether Conan Doyle had any of these poisonous emerald green books in his library.
The risk of serious health problems caused by handling these books is now mainly limited to people such as librarians and private collectors, who are being warned of the dangers.
Some arsenical book examples from The Poison Book Project:
