One Way to Deal with Lead in Children's Products: Ban Kid's Books - Page 2

But the law may even reach into the shelves of our public and school libraries. In a February 3 letter to four U.S. Senators and Representatives who expressed concern about requiring third party testing of books, CPSC Commissioner Thomas Moore wrote:

Libraries are extremely concerned about the impact of the lead provision on the children's books on their shelves. I believe that our staff has come up with a supportable "bright line" [the 1985 cutoff date] to guide libraries as to what books we will deem not to pose a problem and which ones should be sequestered until we get more information from the publishing and ink manufacturing industries. The book publishers have asserted that children's books pose no problems, but we know that the ink used in children's books prior to the 1980s did contain lead.

We haven't gotten the kind of information we need about all the components of children's books to be able to issue them a blanket exemption. The industry has made assertions and done very limited testing, but the Act requires more, as it should, before we can exempt a children's product from the lead content requirements of the law. We cannot act on the "everyone knows children's books don't contain lead" and "historically there has never been a problem with lead in children's books" assertions, particularly when we now know that children's books have indeed contained lead in the past.

This all seems totally mind boggling. The Headmistress at The Common Room had a couple perceptive observations in a post that also itemizes the many classic books that could be removed from inventory destroyed because of this law:

Lead has to be ingested or inhaled to make you sick. If your kids are rolling book pages and smoking them, there is no law strong enough to protect that child from himself.

How many pages of the book does a kid have to eat in order to get elevated lead levels, and how many kids over four are likely to stick their books in their mouths and suck them down to pulp? Has there ever been a case of a child getting lead poisoning from a book?

Article Author: Tim Gebhart

Tim Gebhart lives in Sioux Falls, SD, where he practices law in order to provide shelter for his family, his dogs, and his books. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and his blog de guerre is A Progressive on the Prairie.

Visit Tim Gebhart's author page — Tim Gebhart's Blog