how to bookworm-proof your books (hint: poison)

i woke up early on saturday morning with the rational fear that a bunch of idiot bookworms might somehow infiltrate my edwardian-era study and make a smörgåsbord of all my best books.

so to keep my books safe, i dialed up an 1884 book pesticide recipe. the article suggests rubbing your books down with an extremely toxic chemical, and not just any toxic chemical, one that used to be used to treat syphilis and preserve severed body parts.

materials needed: clean rain water (1 imperial pint), feather (1), sponge tied to a stick (1), and some poisonous mercury chloride (1 ounce) 

Keeping books in a damp room, and moving them but seldom, will render them particularly liable to attack. For many years I have employed a solution of corrosive sublimate of mercury in clean rain-water, applied with a pen or feather, to destroy the grubs, both in books and furniture, and have applied it generally on book-covers, as well as on articles of furniture, by means of a sponge tied on the end of a short stick, to avoid wetting the fingers.

I have employed [this solution]… in consequence of reading in Thenard’s “Traité de Chemie,”  of a method first used by Dr. Chaussier of preserving dead bodies, by putting them into a saturated solution of this salt. Thenard says there that he has seen a human head thus preserved, which had been exposed to the sun and rain for a great many years, without having undergone the slightest alteration.

until monsanto invents a variety of paper that is resistant to bookworms, mercury chloride may be your best bet.