485. Books Bound in Human Skin

  Books Bound in Human Skin

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Yes, it’s called anthropodermic bibliopegy, meaning books bound in human skin, and it really does happen.  And we aren’t alking about ghouls or psychopaths or Jack the Ripper; we’re talking about ordinary people, some of them even scholars or sensitive souls.

In 2014 the Houghton Library at Harvard University announced that its copy of Des destinées de l’âme (Destinies of the Soul), a meditation by the French novelist and poet Arsène Houssaye dating from the mid-1880s, had been subjected to tests and found to be bound in human skin.  The book had been acquired in 1934 and was one of three copies in the Harvard libraries that had been tested; the other two proved to be of sheepskin.  The book was an object of morbid curiosity, especially among undergraduates, and a reminder that this practice — binding a book in human skin — was once considered acceptable.

Houssaye had given a copy of the book to his friend Ludovic Bouland, a prominent Strasbourg doctor who had a specimen of skin from a woman’s back.  Knowing that Houssaye had written his book while mourning the death of his wife, Bouland thought such a binding appropriate.  The good doctor meant it as an act of compassion, but the skin had been taken without consent from a mentally ill patient who died in an asylum and whose body was unclaimed.  But Harvard’s possession of the item, once its story was known, provoked outrage.  Protesters declared it a macabre disgrace and urged the library to immediately get rid of it.

Not everyone agrees.  There are collectors eager to acquire any rare and controversial item, and that certainly includes books bound in human skin.  Such books are sold discreetly for undisclosed prices that are high enough to encourage the production of fakes bound in calfskin or pigskin, and detectable only through a process called peptide mass fingerprinting.  To date, 31 books have been tested, of which 18 have been confirmed as human skin books.  But dealers and collecctors are reluctant to have their books tested, since a negative result diminishes the book’s value; human skin books, real or fake, are sexy.  Nor are librarians eager to have their books tested, since a positive result courts outrage and notoriety.

Where does the skin come from?  From where you might expect: executed criminals whose remains were unclaimed, and the mentally ill who died in asylums.  But there have been voluntary donors, too.  Notably, George Walton, a notorious highwayman who died of tuberculosis in a Massachusetts state prison in 1837.  Dying, he asked the attending physician to remove skin from his back after death, so it could bind a book relating his story, which he had dictated to a cooperative prison warden.  The book, now at the Boston Athenaeum, has been tested and its binding is indeed of human skin.

Much more can be said on the subject, including its relation to tattooed skin, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was preserved and colleccted by medical collectors, ethnographers, and criminologists.  The Science Museum archive in London has a collection of 300 specimens acquired in 1929 from a Parisian doctor who described them as taken from sailors, soldiers, murderers, and criminals of all nationalities.

I confess that I find this whole business eerie, to put it mildly, and degrading to the human body.  Marketing human skin books and pieces of tattooed skin reminds me of the Field Museum in Chicago, which once advertised its display of Egyptian mummies by boasting that, thanks to modern technology, you could now see their grotesquely preserved remains inside their sarcophogi.  “Bury the dead, you sick people,” was one resulting online comment; I’m inclined to agree.

Source note:  This post was inspired by Mike Jay’s article “The Hide That Binds,” in the November 5, 2020, issue of The New York Review of Books.  The article is a review of Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Imvestigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, by Megan Rosenbloom.  All the post’s content comes from Jay’s review.

Coming soon:  Sparklers in Lockdown: How Is the Diamond District Doing Today?

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