re: #642 MandyManners

Remember the link buzzsawmonkey posted a while back about children’s books published before a certain date being banned due to the lead in the ink? What about adult books?!

I missed that one.

For what it’s worth, black ink typically uses carbon as it’s pigment. No lead is involved. Heavy metal oxides are used in color printing inks.

Of course, we’ve seen how science can be grossly distorted for political purposes in many other cases; global warming leaps to mind, as do any number of unfounded pesticide panics.

And even then, with traditional printing the typesetting, negatives and plates are typically archived for use in reprintings. Typesetting has recently moved to direct-to-negative and even direct-to-plate processes, eliminating those intermediate steps, but the plates themselves are normally kept. I suppose even those will eventually disappear as cheaper alternatives are found. But for the moment, there are enormous piles of such materials kept on hand.

Once again, though, this concentrates control over the underlying information in very few hands. The Communists of the 20th century would have absolutely loved such bottlenecking of information.