Witch Fever: William Morris' Claim to Infamy
John Savard
Posts: 1,154
Earlier today, I noticed a YouTube video about a deadly book. It turned out that it wasn't that its contents drove people insane, but rather, the wallpaper specimens in it caused arsenic poisoning.
I did some searching by Google. I wondered if anyone had ever written a historical survey of how humanity had unintentionally poisoned itself through the ages - from Roman plumbing to tetraethyl lead in gasoline, and including Victorian green wallpaper - and haven't found one yet.
But I did learn that William Morris, famed for his Golden type, thought the doctors opposed to the use of arsenical pigments in wallpaper had gone daft - he wrote, in a letter to a friend, that they had been "bitten by the witch fever"!
2
Categories
- All Categories
- 43 Introductions
- 3.8K Typeface Design
- 815 Font Technology
- 1.1K Technique and Theory
- 633 Type Business
- 450 Type Design Critiques
- 549 Type Design Software
- 30 Punchcutting
- 138 Lettering and Calligraphy
- 85 Technique and Theory
- 53 Lettering Critiques
- 499 Typography
- 308 History of Typography
- 117 Education
- 74 Resources
- 513 Announcements
- 82 Events
- 107 Job Postings
- 156 Type Releases
- 167 Miscellaneous News
- 271 About TypeDrawers
- 53 TypeDrawers Announcements
- 117 Suggestions and Bug Reports