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Let It Bend, but Not Break
The last item in this inventory of objects turned into weapons in more or less ridiculous or more or less successful ways is books. I thought it was important to include them at the end because you’ll have noticed that this is, in fact, a book, which means you’re holding a potential murder weapon in your hands. This puts us in the privileged position of being able to offer a theoretical and practical demonstrationIf you’re reading this online, you’ll miss the practical part, but the upside is that you’re reading it for free, yay! If you’re reading it as an ebook, you’ll miss the practical part too, but, well, we don’t know of anyone who’s killed someone with an ebook yet.:
Let’s start, naturally, with the theory.
Ever since we started doing it, we humans have written wherever we could. Originally, on cave walls (if we count hands and animal drawings as a form of writing), but, more properly, on clay tablets. More than 3,000 years ago, the Sumerians discovered that they could make different-shaped holes—wedges—in clay and use them to write down very important things like lists of goods and decrees. Then the Egyptians realized that clay turns to mud when it gets wet and made a brilliant decision: they started writing important things in stoneThe most famous of these stones is the Rosetta Stone, which bears a decree by Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes and was inscribed in hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek writing. It was part of a larger structure and was discovered by chance near Rosetta, Egypt, in July 1799 by Pierre-François Bouchard, a French soldier. Its discovery made it possible to decipher hieroglyphs for the first time and, in a way, to communicate with people who had lived on the planet thousands of years earlier.. Of course, writing on stone has its difficulties too. Just imagine how inconvenient it would be to write “bread, onion, milk, and detergent” on a stone and carry it to the market. So the Egyptians used papyrus for everyday writing—that is, for things that weren’t pharaohs’ decrees. It was a kind of cloth made from the stem of Cyperus papyrus, a plant that grew in the Nile Valley.
But beyond these precedents, it’s worth saying that Cai Lun, an official at the palace of China’s Han dynasty, systematized paper-making around 100 CE using tree barkA word of caution, though: around that time, the Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica had developed amatl, a kind of paper made from ficus bark that could be written on both sides.. The Chinese method gradually spread, reaching Central Asia around 750, Baghdad in 790, and, by the first millennium, paper workshops and mills had sprung up in various parts of Europe. Paper’s advantage over papyrus is that it can be made from the bark of various plants. Papyrus, on the other hand, can only be made from Cyperus papyrus and, although it works very well for making scrolls, it’s extremely brittle: if you fold it, it breaks. So, because it was easier to make and performed better, the Asian technology won out, as it so often does.
By the nineteenth century—if I haven’t mentioned it, objectively the best century in human history—paper-making had been systematized, and European countries were exporting it to their colonies. Even so, it remained an expensive and highly sought-after material. In fact, of the 450 invitations to the Open Cabildo of May 22, 1810, only two have survived, and they’re in the National Historical MuseumOf Buenos Aires’s 45,000 inhabitants, only men who owned property, horses, and weapons were invited to Open Cabildos (which were fairly unusual). Black people, mestizos, criollos, and, of course, women were not allowed to take part. The one on May 22 may have been the most important in Argentine history because it led to the viceroy’s removal and the formation of the first national government three days later. The invitations for that day were printed at the Royal Printing House for Foundlings, which was run by Agustín Donado, a supporter of the Revolution (he later designed the seal used to sign documents, something like a precursor to the National Coat of Arms). Donado is believed to have ordered 600 invitations to be printed, rather than the planned 450, so he could bring along revolutionary supporters. Donado Street in the City of Buenos Aires, two blocks from the house where I lived with my parents for many years, was named in his honor., and the most amazing thing is that they have accounts and some notes written in the margins because people reused pamphlets as much as they could.
Paper technology continued to advance, along with, of course, scissor technology, which is almost as old as paper, though not as old as stones. But for our purposes, this will do.
Ink
We humans have been writing things in ink for at least 5,000 years. In ancient Egypt, ink was used to write on papyrus. Black ink, made from a mixture of soot and various oils, was used for the main text; red ink, made from substances with a high iron content, was used for titles and highlighted sections. Incredibly, the recipes for these inks weren’t written down anywhere—not even on a stone. Their composition wasn’t determined until 2025, thanks to synchrotrons, devices that accelerate electrons and make them move in a circle, generating very intense light that allows matter to be analyzed in great detail. That’s how we found out what the ink is made of in the writings from the only library of ancient Egypt that survives to this day. Using this method, researchers also discovered that the Egyptians added lead to the ink mixture as a drying agent. They must have been impatient.
Lead was used again in the fifteenth century. European painters of the time added it to their oil paints to make them dry faster, just like the Egyptians, and we know this because this time they did bother to write down the recipe. But today we know even more: for example, that lead ions (present in that powder) help oxidize compounds in the oil, which in turn helps those compounds clump together and form a solid polymer. We also know that lead is pretty toxic.As Captain Sir John Franklin, leader of the lost Franklin expedition, knew all too well; or Caligula, who made his horse a consul; or the manufacturers of the lead-white pigment Rembrandt van Rijn used in his paintings; and as you know, since after all those footnotes asking you to, you’ve surely read my first book, Breve atlas anecdótico de la ciencia, where I tell this whole story. The Dutch painters of the following century—the seventeenth—also used lead, but not to make paint dry faster. They used it to get the color white: they suspended sheets of lead over vinegar in jars that were buried in horse manure for several weeks. Thanks to the acetic acid in the vinegar, basic lead carbonate crystals formed on the sheets. Fermentation of the manure kept the surroundings warm, encouraging the reaction. When the jars were dug up and opened, the basic lead carbonate crystals were harvested. Grinding them and mixing them with oil produced the perfect white. The Dutch method, however, was extremely dangerous, especially when the jar was opened, because the worker (since workers did this job) breathed in the vapor, which had an extremely high lead content. The life expectancy of those who made this color was much lower than that of the rest of the population, whose average lifespan in the sixteenth century was under 40—and that’s if there wasn’t an epidemic.
Still, to be fair, life on Earth remained particularly dangerous for several centuries: children played with lead soldiers, fans were made of unguarded metal, refrigerators couldn’t be opened from the inside, and arsenic was everywhere. During the century I can’t stop talking about, you could find it in any pharmacy. This was because arsenic is present in various metallic minerals, and smelting almost any metal releases elemental arsenic, which reacts with oxygen to produce arsenious acid, a white powder that was sold cheaply and ended up in many products, such as candles and insecticides. It also accidentally contaminated many other products, because if a package wasn’t labeled properly, it could easily be mistaken for sugar or salt.
Arsenic is highly toxic because it can deform proteins, which are essential to everything related to life, and because it also mimics adenosine triphosphate (or ATP), the energy currency of cells. In the presence of arsenic, proteins become deformed and the cell stores energy in pentavalent arsenic instead of ATP, which is much less stable and less efficient. When it’s ingested—accidentally or because someone has been poisoned—it causes symptoms very similar to those caused by hundreds of common nineteenth-century illnesses, such as cholera and diphtheria. Arsenic was therefore an ideal poison, not only because it was cheap and available at any pharmacy, but because its effects could easily be mistaken for the hundreds of diseases of the time. In fact, it was the poison of choice for Mary Ann Cotton, England’s first serial killer (before Jack the Ripper), who used it to kill her four husbands and several of her children by putting it in the meals she made for them.
This perfect modus operandi wasn’t countered until the Marsh test was developed. Designed by James Marsh, it detects arsine, an easily identifiable gas produced by adding zinc and an acid to a sample containing arsenic. If the sample tests positive, adding these compounds releases arsine gas. When heated, arsine produces a metallic residue that forms a mirror when it lands on glass. That’s why the test is known as the “mirror test,” and it was thanks to this test that Mary Ann was sentenced to death in 1873. The mirror test came back positive when they analyzed the body of her stepson, who had died shortly before. And while all this arsenic business has nothing to do with using books to kill, by this point you’ve probably forgotten that the chapter was supposed to be about that, which goes to show that a book can be very dangerous because of its power to distract. If you’re on a train or a bus, make sure you haven’t gone past your stop.
Anyway, yes, let’s get back to the subject.
Better Late Than Never
As I said in an earlier footnote—which, if you haven’t read it, breaks my heart—the printing press came to humanity incredibly late. Although there were already ways to copy texts, the technology wasn’t widely adopted until the mid-fifteenth century, following the invention by the German Johannes Gutenberg. What was new in this case was the mechanical system and the movable type that made large-scale printing possible.
All the components of the invention—metal engraving, ink, paper, all of it—had been known for millennia.Apparently we humans like watching other people copy things by hand, because the photocopier also came along pretty late. It wasn’t until October 22, 1938, that Chester Carlson, a physicist who worked in the patent department of P. R. Mallory in New York and knew firsthand the nightmare of copying documents by hand, made the first photocopy in human history in Astoria, Queens: a piece of paper that read “10-22-38 ASTORIA.” It worked like this: in a photocopier, light strikes a charged, photoconductive surface. Wherever the light hits, the surface loses its charge; where the original blocks it (because there’s writing on it), the charge remains. This creates the electrostatic pattern of the image to be copied. Then the toner, a black powder carrying the opposite charge, sticks to those areas, transfers to the paper, and is fixed in place with heat. And just like that, bam, we have a photocopy. The materials needed for this process—paper, light sources, static electricity, and photoconductive surfaces—had all existed for centuries before 1938. It’s a phenomenon similar to the bicycle, whose principles and components had existed long before someone thought to put one together. Or the photocopier, which I mention in case you’re still in the habit of not reading footnotes. Likewise, though it came late, the printing press was an incredible invention: just a few years after it was invented, millions of books were already circulating thanks to it.
Francesco de Madiis was a Venetian bookseller who, like some other heroes of history, liked to write everything down. For example, he recorded that between 1484 and 1488, just three decades after Gutenberg’s invention, his bookshop sold more than 25,000 books. It was surely the most important bookshop in Venice, at a time when Venice was the most important center of world trade, but even so, that’s a huge number considering that all of Europe had a population of around 90 million and fewer than 10% could read. For comparison, the first edition of this book had a print run of 4,000 copies.
Over time, Gutenberg’s method was refined and automated.In general, books are printed on sheets, large pieces of paper on which, for example, eight pages are printed on each side. They’re then folded in half, then into quarters, and finally into eighths. Those sixteen folded pages are sewn or glued into the book’s spine. In fact, if you look at this book’s spine, you’ll see several folded sections attached to it. You can do it now; I’ll wait. See? Well, each of those sections is a single sheet that was printed and then folded four times. Fortunately for people who bought the physical book, the printing process also included trimming the folded sheets so that pages could be turned without a problem. But that wasn’t always the case. One example I love is Mendel. Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian monk who, I like to say, had a lot of time on his hands. He tended a garden at a monastery in what is now the Czech Republic, and he was a keen observer, very good at math, and, on top of all that, lucky. In the garden there were peas that could be cross-pollinated in a controlled way—that is, he could take pollen from one flower and put it on another, wait for seeds to grow, plant them, and observe certain traits in the new plant (I told you, Gregor had a lot of time on his hands). He was lucky in his choice of traits: he picked seven that were very easy to identify and that, as we now know, are determined by one gene, or at least by genes that are inherited together. By observing these traits, controlling hundreds of crosses, and doing a lot of statistics, he reached a series of conclusions that we now know as “Mendel’s laws.” They hold true for the vast majority of genes in all species that reproduce sexually, such as peas and humans. My point is that the papers in which he published these findings, in 1860, had absolutely no impact at the time. We know this because around forty copies were printed, and fifty years later, most of them still had uncut pages because no one had read them. Printing presses quickly became enormously powerful tools because they could amplify messages, and that always causes problems. Turning books into weapons of war was just one small step from there.
Dangerous Books
There are several ways a book can be dangerous. One is to read it:
The term “Victorian era” refers to the period that coincided with Victoria’s reign, from 1837 to 1901 in the United Kingdom. I don’t know if that’s the most appropriate way to describe it, and that’s not what this chapter is trying to do either, but I’d describe it as a pompous age. Somehow, everything had to be showy, and books were no exception. Luckily, there was a cheap way to make a spectacular, intense green dye: the famous emerald green. Emerald green was used for everything: clothes, hats, toys, and bookbinding. Especially for books with cloth covers.
Emerald green was made by mixing acetate and copper with something cheap and easy to get just about everywhere: arsenic, which, as it turns out, did have something to do with this chapter’s subject, to everyone’s delight. In fact, it had so much to do with it that there was something called the “Poison Book Project,” made up of several museums and bookstores in the United Kingdom and the United States, which studied the composition of the dyes used in bookbinding during the Victorian era. They found arsenic, lead, and other metals in hundreds of books from that period, confirming that the world was dangerous for many centuries, as I said earlier. While reading, readers were often exposed to these books for long stretches and sometimes wet their finger in their mouth to turn the pages, which meant arsenic entered their bodies. But if you do that with this book, don’t worry: this copy was printed using offsetIt’s called “offset,” something like indirect, because the ink doesn’t go straight onto the paper; it’s first transferred to a rubber mesh, so it’s an indirect printing process. with ink that isn’t edible, but isn’t toxic either. Today, Victorian books and their spectacular covers are stored in plastic bags, and you have to wear gloves to handle them. And you definitely shouldn’t lick your fingers to turn their pages.
Another way a book can be dangerous is simply by carrying it around:
In the Soviet Union, between 1922 and 1953, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin (whose name means something like “man of steel”), was in power; printing presses and photocopiers were tightly regulated and controlled by the state. Books were subjected to extremely strict censorship. Carrying banned books was a serious crime that could lead to the death penalty or prison in the dreaded gulags, which meant almost no one dared to carry—much less read—banned books.
After Stalin died, things opened up: when Nikita Khrushchev was in power, thousands of books were still censored and printing presses and photocopiers remained under state control, but punishments were no longer as harsh. That was when samizdat emerged, a system for self-publishing, circulating, and spreading underground texts. As a system, it was relentless: everyone who received a copy of a banned text had to copy it and distribute it at least four times. This was done with carbon paperThe “CC” in emails comes from “carbon copy,” a tribute to the twentieth century that worked out great for us Spanish speakers because we translated it as “con copia” (“with copy”)., which was placed between the sheets of paper, and a typewriter. The author’s name was left off to protect them, and since paper was also a sensitive supply (because buying too much could attract attention), people tried to save as much as possible by writing over every bit of space on the page. The texts also often included comments from the person doing the copying, and sometimes the original texts were changed.
Samizdat, with its cheap paper that was almost always smudged in places and covered in comments in the margins, became a cultural hallmark that stood in contrast to official publications, which had flashy editions checked by censors and, of course, posed no danger at all.
But to me, the deadliest form a book can take is the one in the next section. I saved it for last because it can cause the most deaths.
And after that, kaput. It’s over.
Book Cipher
You Shall Be as Gods is a book Erich Fromm published in 1966 and, according to my dad, it’s about the impotence of the West. I never read it, but when I was a kid it was a central book in our family library because my mom and dad hid their salary money in it. Before ATMs, salaried workers usually got paid on the last working day of the month,That’s where the term “ñoquis” comes from: people who only show up at work to collect their pay at the end of the month, like ñoquis, which tradition says are eaten on the 29th. and all the money stayed at home, hidden somewhere. In my family’s case, it was in a particularly battered book right in the middle of the bookshelf. And I say “particularly battered” because I love the word and because of how it looked, worn down from being taken out and put back in its place every day and, above all, from having weathered periods of hyperinflation, when salaries were huge stacks of bills worth very little. I don’t know how common it was for people to hide money in books, but when I was a kid, I thought every house had a copy of You Shall Be as Gods with money inside.
Although I hope other families chose safer methods, the truth is my parents weren’t the first to think of hiding things in books. The National Museum of Ireland has a French dictionary that, when closed, gives nothing away, but when you open it, it’s hollowed out in the center and contains a small automatic pistol. The dictionary was left at the reception desk of the Gresham Hotel in Dublin, Ireland, in 1921, with a little note that said “for Miss K. Mullen or Mrs P Kingsbury.” They never picked it up. It’s believed those were fake names and that the pistol was part of the arsenal of Cumann na mBan, the women’s branch of the Irish independence movement led by Agnes O’Farrelly.
But the person who really knew how to hide things in books was Richard Sorge. He hid something infinitely more dangerous than a weapon and more valuable than two salaries. He hid information.
Richard Sorge was a German journalist who went everywhere with his little book with the dull green cover, a terribly boring but very Nazi book containing the regime’s statistics: how much grain had been sold, trade balances, things like that. A truly boring book, but Richard took it everywhere. He was a good journalist.
Of course, Richard wasn’t just a journalist.
In 1914, during the First World War, he was wounded in the leg and spent quite a while in the hospital. Little by little, he also became interested in socialism. In 1919, he joined the German Communist Party, which started to cause him problems a few years later. Taking advantage of the fact that his mother was Russian, he moved to Moscow in 1924 and soon after joined the Soviet Union’s Central Intelligence Department.
In 1930, using journalism as a cover, he traveled to China as a correspondent for the German magazine Soziologische, all the while reporting to the Soviet Union. He returned to Germany in 1934 and joined the National Socialist Party, with Adolf Hitler already in power. That same year, he managed to travel to Japan, which was seen as a potential threat to the Soviet regime. There he became very close friends with Eugen Ott, a German military attaché whose wife he secretly saw for several years. Richard was very good at hiding things.
Little by little, pretending to be a thoroughly committed Nazi, he worked his way up through the circles of power and began getting access to classified information, which he relayed to Moscow. Spies generally try not to attract attention: they don’t drive flashy cars, dress in muted colors to make their lives seem dull and unremarkable, and never, ever like to be in photos. Richard was the exact opposite: he rode around on a very flashy motorcycle, hitting bars at night, had lots of lovers, and was often seen in photos with other people. Still, no one suspected him, and he continued to have access to classified information.
But the important thing is that Richard never parted with his dull green book, his statistics book. Why? Because in Moscow there was another person with exactly the same book, the same edition, an identical copy. And that alone was enough to encrypt messages. Richard Sorge was the master of the book cipher.
The system worked like this: messages were transmitted by radio as a series of numbers. When Richard wanted to send a message, he looked up the words he needed in the book and sent a sequence of three numbers for each word in the message: each number indicated the page, line, and position of a word. That way, if the message was intercepted, no one could understand what he was trying to say. It was just a series of incomprehensible numbers.
On June 20, 1941, for example, Sorge warned that Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union, breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had been signed on August 23, 1939. Stalin didn’t believe him and mocked him, accusing him of being a pervert. Two days later, Operation Barbarossa began, the German invasion that brought the Soviet Union into the war, in which more than 10 million Soviets died.
The next message Richard sent was on September 13. It said something like:
I said this chapter was theoretical and practical because the print version of the book you’re reading doesn’t have the solutions in parentheses, and you have to find them encrypted throughout the book. What a game! Unfortunately, this digital format can’t make the system work, so, as I said in the chapter’s first footnote, we don’t get to play. See? Not everything in the past was worse. But never mind. The important thing is that this time Stalin did believe Sorge and listened to him. Thanks to that, he decided to concentrate the troops against the German attack instead of splitting them up and sending them to the other end of the country to stop a Japanese attack that would never come. This piece of information helped the Soviet Union win the war.
That same year, the Japanese army’s military police captured the painter Yotoku Miyagi, who was part of Richard’s spy network. Yotoku was tortured for several hours and ended up giving him away.
Richard was arrested on October 18, 1941, and although he confessed and provided reports on his activities, he was sentenced to death. Apparently, the Japanese government tried to exchange him for prisoners held by the Soviet Union, but Moscow denied knowing him. Richard was hanged on November 7, 1944. They chose that date because it coincided with the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. According to his executioners, his last words, spoken in perfect Japanese, were “Long live the Soviet Communist Party! Long live the Red Army! Long live the USSR!”
His remains were buried in a mass grave in the cemetery of Sugamo Prison, in Tokyo. In 1950, after the war was over, Ishii Hanako, one of his lovers, requested that he be exhumed. Since then, his remains have been in Tama Cemetery, in the western part of the same city. The stone headstone reads in three languages (Russian, English, and Japanese): “Richard Sorge - Hero of the Soviet Union.”
