I'm kind of shocked that this went so broadly unremarked upon, but the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which went into effect in February, declared that pre-1985 children's books may be unsafe, and is cracking down on the circulation and sale of such books, despite the fact that, as City Journal wrote at the time:
Books are getting destroyed because of this, and it's a tragedy, for booksellers, for libraries, which are often tragically underresourced, and may not be able to replace those books if they're forced to get rid of old copies, and for collectors. Like Megan McArdle, I can't imagine what my life would be like without the ancient books on my grandmother's shelves, or the huge box of Trixie Belden books my mother gave me to read when I was younger. But this isn't a matter of a collector's whims, or of childhood nostalgia. Not all of the books that will be destroyed, or abandoned, or removed from libraries exist in contemporary reprints. People will lose, perhaps permanently, public access to works of literature becuase of this law. It's insane, it's foolish, it's culturally criminal, and it ought to be rolled back as soon as possible.
While lead poisoning from other sources, such as paint in old houses, remains a serious public health problem in some communities, no one seems to have been able to produce a single instance in which an American child has been made ill by the lead in old book illustrations—not surprisingly, since unlike poorly maintained wall paint, book pigments do not tend to flake off in large lead-laden chips for toddlers to put into their mouths.
