Last summer Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA). While well intentioned, being primarily a result of the toys being made with in China with lead paint scare that swept the country, CPSIA has potential catastrophic consequences for the book world. What's the problem? Any book printed before 1986 becomes illegal in the hands of children.
Author David Niall Wilson sums it up nicely in his post, Burning Books for Consumer Safety:
Under this law...very strict testing is imposed on every children’s book published before 1985 (It really did start in 1984 Mr. Orwell…right after) - so strict that Thrift Stores around the country have actually begun destroying and throwing away all children’s books written before 1985. 209 years of children’s story magic, the illustrations of Wyeth, Winnie the Pooh, The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, The Wind in the Willows and Charlotte’s Web.
Apparently the regulations that kept lead out of the ink used in illustrations was written long after those denying that same use in paint for toys.
They are getting ready to burn the magic. They are getting ready to destroy something that means more than we can probably even conceive at this early point in the game. There is only one group that can stop them, and we are it.
The testing of these pre-1986 books to see if they are "safe for our children" is cost prohibitive for most businesses rendering compliance impossible.
Librarians must be going nuts trying to figure this one out. There are 116,000 public and school libraries across the country and I bet every last one of them has a "contaminated" book on its shelves.
There is a collectible loophole in the bill as Walter Olson points out in his detailed review of the issue; The New Book Banning. "Older books were pointedly left off the safe list; the commission did allow an exception for vintage collectibles whose age, price, or rarity suggested that they would most likely be used by adult collectors, rather than given to children."
Enforcement; however, seems impossible though with so many people out of work these days the government could easily hire a brigade of lead police to crisscross the country jailing booksellers and other offenders. A whole new cottage industry of enforcement, testing and compliance could spring up over night.
Who could possibly benefit from this ill-conceived law. Well, how about Google and Amazon for starters. Call me paranoid but if you eliminate the opportunity for people to acquire these books in their original form from bookstores and let's assume that the publishers of pre-1985 books are not going to "safely" reprint them then where will you be able to get them. Where will this vast archive of of literary history live? Hmm, Google Book Search should have a copy for your perusal and Amazon just might have a copy for you to print on demand. Now how safe is that for the health of our society?
It is absolutely ludicrous to think for a minute that this is presents a serious issue for our children. Yes, children love to put things in their mouths but that's a far cry from being a bibliophagist!
Jay Dempsey, a health communications specialist at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) says of the risk "If that child were to actually start mouthing the book — as some children put everything in their mouths — that's where the concern would be...But on a scale of one to 10, this is like a 0.5 level of concern."
So please keep your laws off our books; us booksellers have enough to worry about these days.
A rally is planned for April Fools Day in Washington, D.C.
5 comments:
A friend of mine who does XRF testing said she'd tested some books and found lead in the illustrations but not in the type of pre-1985 books. So there definitely can be lead in the illustrations.
My favorite thing? "Children" goes up to age 12. Because there's such a problem with 5th graders getting lead poisoning by eating ballpoint pens (included in the ban, as they've got lead in the alloy in the ball point -- they've been pulling them off the shelves), zippers, and textbooks. (To say nothing of them getting lead poisoning from eating 100% cotton t-shirts, which also have to be tested for lead before they can be sold...) Meh.
I'm glad to see my words getting out on this...thank you for posting them. This really is madness, and one can almost imagine the glee at publishing houses who can possibly buy up rights to these older books to recreate them rather than take chances on newer authors and books...pod houses like Amazon will certainly reap benefits if it all continues.
This is tragedy enough without compounding the problem by inferring hidden agendas among those who are -frankly- too consumed with bigger problems. I don't mean this unkindly but when the topic came up on my site months ago, I explained that to presume such was an expression of narcissism. Face it, we're just not that important and intimating otherwise is a way of making ourselves feel more important and powerful than we are. We are not the target of anyone other than special interest groups. It is against they that our umbrage should be directed. Anything else reduces our credibility.
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I'm a children's bookseller and I had to run to Snopes when I first heard about this proposed law. I still have my fingers crossed (and I'm pushing petitions and writing letters as well), that this won't actually be enforced.
Every day that I work with older children's books, it's like hopping into a time machine; the texture of the pages, the thickness of the boards, the vibrancy and style of the older illustrations...the proud but shaky child's name written inside the front cover....
There's so much more to these books than just the story; they truly are relics from our past and they do such a fantastic job of tying one generation to the next.
I can't imagine depriving a mother or grandmother from being able to buy a fondly remembered book to share with her family.
If our politicians are so concerned about children's health, they need to direct their energies toward cleaning up our water, air and food production.
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