CPSIA and books

In case you haven't been following the news lately, there is a new law going into effect on February 10th that was passed in reaction to the lead in children's toys scare. Basically this law requires anyone selling or distributing items intending for children under 12 to have them certified to be lead free. Sounds good on the surface until those of us in the book and library world found out that this legislation has been determined to include books. The testing must be done by only select laboratories and even though books do not have lead in them, the publishers have been unable to get an exemption from this law. The American Library Association has also been unable to get a determination if libraries are exempt from the law either and if it goes into effect as written, will instruct libraries to either remove all childrens books or make libraries off-limits to children.

To read more about how this might affect you I recommend reading the blog, Musings from a Catholic Bookstore.

The law goes into effect on February 10th and if you have any kid’s products that haven’t been certified, you are required to destroy them. We have created this site to keep track of Catholic and other Christian vendor certifications so that you don’t have to contact everyone yourselves. If you do contact a vendor, please send us the information so we can update this site and save the vendors from having to answer the same question hundreds of times.

I could go on and on (and I do on my personal blog) but I thought it might be a good idea to give our faithful readers a heads up here too

Edible Books

Every year, as a close as possible to April Fool's Day, the International Edible Book Festival is celebrated by bibliophiles worldwide. This year, the Cardinal Stafford Library entered the Boulder Festival with our edible scroll which had a passage from Ezekial, Chapter 3:

1 He said to me: Son of man, eat what is before you; eat this scroll, then go, speak to the house of Israel.
2 So I opened my mouth and he gave me the scroll to eat.
3 Son of man, he then said to me, feed your belly and fill your stomach with this scroll I am giving you. I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth. He said:
4 Son of man, go now to the house of Israel, and speak my words to them.

Our first attempt at making the scroll out of unbaked phyllo dough and food coloing, shriveled and cracked and quite frankly was not so very edible (uncooked phyllo dough taste like wallpaper paste)




Our second attempt took several layers of the dough that were stuck together with a honey and butter paste, painted with the food colors and then baked at 350 for about 15 minutes - the quote had to be abbreviated but captured the essence of the passage - the proof was in the pudding as they say, because the final scroll was actually quite tasty - at the book festival I watched as one young man literally tore the scroll in half and devoured it before my eyes





the most extraordinary entry at the festival was the chocolate typewriter/pasta machine/book that was sold by the slice - quite incredible and extremely yummy

link to the Boulder Camera video about the show