Literary quarantine: National Library of France removes books believed to be laced with arsenic
Remember Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film The Name of the Rose, based on Umberto Eco’s historical mystery novel of the same name? In it, a Franciscan friar William of Baskerville (Sean Connery) heads to an abbey northern Italy to investigate a mysterious death – which turns into a series of untimely demises – linked to Aristotle’s "Second Book of Poetics", which describes how comedy can be used to teach. Believing jocularity to be instruments of the Devil, some devious bastard (we won’t spoil that part here) poisons the pages to stop the spread of dangerous ideas, and those reading the book would in...