Reading a book is usually a peaceful, harmless, even enriching activity. But there is one book in history whose reading—or mere possession—proved fatal for many. Not because it contained subversive ideas or blasphemy, but because the physical object itself...
tl;dr
in Victorian times the author wanted to warn people about the arsenic in wallpaper and its dangers, so he published a book of wallpaper samples with arsenic that then itself poisoned and killed people who handled the book
“Hey, grenades are dangerous.”
Hands you a grenade with the pin pulled.
(At the funeral.) “Told you.”
ha, the logic is a bit wacky, but I can also see how maybe publishing a book like that might cause a moral panic that could result in regulatory action (and to be fair that’s how the FDA was created, after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle resulted in a moral panic)