Another problem- there aren’t enough buyers interested in each and every old treasure to justify the costs of reprinting every single one of them, especially with the new requirements that all components of each new title be subjected to expensive, redundant, third party testing. Testing can run into the thousands of dollars.

Republish Bravest of All, and how many people are going to buy it? Five hundred? Okay, so then use the same inks, papers, and presses to republish, say, The Provensen’s A Peaceable Kingdom (a sweet picture book last published in 1981), and you have to do the testing of those same materials all over again- and for how many copies? How many thousands of copies have to be sold just to recoup testing costs?

My family has safely and frugally stocked a family library of over 8,000 volumes, half of which were published before 1985. We filled our shelves with oop books discovered at library booksales and thrift shops, seldom paying over a dollar a book; most of them we paid .25 a book. We sometimes more than paid for our own books by buying and selling others- an activity no longer available to me. If we had to rely only on currently in print volumes purchased new, we could not afford to own more than a few of these treasures (we have a large family, my husband supported us through his salary as an enlisted man in the AF).

All this, without any evidence that a child was ever harmed by lead in a book. It is a wholly untenable law, and it’s an outrage that ought to be accepted.