History: The deadly reason why public libraries used to be in everyone's bad books

Remember books? More specifically, library books? Like archaic print-versions of that Netflix subscription one mysterious person pays for but everybody uses.

But did you ever think that musty, dog-eared edition of Love in the Time of Cholera could actually be harbouring deadly disease? 

At the turn of the 20th century, the ‘great book scare’ gripped the nation, nay the world, with this very belief — that perusing the pages of a library book could kill you.

This fear reached fever-pitch in 1895 when the Library Journal