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 — published by the American Librarians Association — reported that one of its employees had ‘checked out’, for good.