HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOOKS BOUND IN HUMAN SKIN SKIN
“The confessions of criminals were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted, or an individual might request to be memorialized for family or lovers in the form of a book.”Ī book about the human soul deserved to have a human coveringīouland refers in his note to another book in his collection, Séverin Pineau’s “De integritatis & corruptionis virginum notis,” that was also covered in human hide. “Termed anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin has occurred at least since the 16th century,” it said. “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” he wrote.Īlthough binding a book in another person’s skin may seem creepy nowadays, the library says it wasn’t always so unusual and reviled. Ludovic Bouland, bound the book “with skin from the unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke,” the library said.īouland left a note in the volume explaining what he had done. Scientists and conservators carried out a series of tests on Houghton Library’s copy of the French writer Arsene Houssaye’s “Des destinees de l’ame” and concluded with 99.9% confidence that the binding material came from a human.Īccording to the library, Houssaye presented the text, described as “a meditation on the soul and life after death,” to one of his friends, a book-loving medical doctor, in the mid-1880s. It’s reading matter not for the faint of heart.Įxperts at Harvard said this week that they have confirmed that a 19th-century book housed in one of the university’s libraries is bound in human skin.
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