Via Wessel and Liebermann (Seattle antiquarian and rare booksellers) comes the tale of how the CPSIA is resulting in a crackdown on old books. The long and short of the story is that because of the broadly sweeping (read: oceanic) terms of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the government is now authorized to force booksellers and libraries to dispose of books — some of which may have been on shelves for the last century or more — if they test positively for containing lead in their inks.

I understand that they’re trying to make the world safe from lead poisoning, but I think it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. These books represent not just literary development for our children; they represent centuries worth of work, of authors’ lives and dreams and hard work. And even if they didn’t, they’d still be works of art and part of our history. Are we really going to let the idea that ravenous, bibliophagic infants may have a small chance of ingesting a tiny amount of lead into their systems lead us to burn or otherwise destroy 200+ years of children’s literature? What about books that had small runs, books that were never reprinted?

It’s just ridiculous. I’m not even sure I support the act at all (it crack downs on independent artists and craftspeople as well, and has slammed Etsy down already with a wave of legal headache), but even if I could buy into the idea that we need to protect ourselves from all the wicked chemicals of the earth, it seems like vast overkill to have this enacted retroactively.

After all, how much damage have these books actually caused? Don’t you think we’d have heard about it if this were a major cause of lead poisoning? If any harm had come from them, wouldn’t they have been pulled from the shelves long ago?

It just all feels like some bizarre back-door entry to Farenheit 451…