On Books Bound in Human Skin
Do we have special obligations towards anthropodermic books?
The history of anthropodermic bibliopegy, as the experts call it, isn’t as interesting as it sounds. Whatever lurid fantasies of necronomicons and wailing grimoires that popular culture has filled our imaginations with, the truth is that there are only a few dozen books that we know of bound in human skin, most of them obscure medical texts from the early modern era. Only in a handful of cases, like a couple editions of Holbein’s Danse Macabre etchings, a private-press edition of Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” and the memoir Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierece, Alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison and bound in his own skin at Allen/Pierece/York/Grove/The Highwayman’s request, we can be reasonably sure that the bookmakers understood that there was something Gothically sordid about binding something in human leather.
Since researchers at the Anthropodermic Book Project started using peptide mass fingerprinting to test the material composition of book bindings in 2014, it’s become apparent that there are vastly more alleged human skin books than actual, confirmed cases. Looking at the list of debunked cases, it’s fair to conclude that, give or take a Danse Macabre, the spookier a human skin book sounds, the less likely its claims are true. Titles like The Huguenot Idolatry, Mirandola’s Opera Omnia, John Locke’s De Intellectu Humanu are actually, respectively, sheepskin, pigskin, and cattle hide.
The real human skin books, as it turns out, are mostly anatomy textbooks from the 19th century, clustered mostly around medical schools in Paris and Philadelphia, and owned by wealthy doctor-bibliophiles. Dr. Joseph Leidy kept a copy of his own Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy bound in the skin of “a soldier who died during the Great Southern Rebellion,” as his notes indicate, while his colleague John Stockton Hugh bound three of his favorite French medical texts in skin taken from the thigh of one Mary Lynch, an Irish immigrant from South Philadelphia who died in his hospital.
This French connection may not have been an accident: anecdotally, there may may have been a similar circle of Parisian gentleman-doctors binding their books in patients’ skin around the same time, with flamboyant tales of erotic verse collections taken from the breasts and thighs of prostitutes, and travel books bound in the skin of tribal subjects from the far corners of the empire. A French bibliographer unaffiliated with Rosenbloom has identified 136 alleged human skin books, mostly held by private collectors with little incentive to cooperate: if the claim turns out to be false, their book loses value; if true, it then becomes illegal to sell them under current laws regarding the sale of human remains.
Why were so many doctors in 19th century Paris and Philadelphia binding their books in human skin? This is the central question of Rosenbloom’s Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Binding Books in Human Skin. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about how and why this fashion came about.
Why did a cluster of American and French doctors in the 19th century bind some of their books in human skin? We don’t know. Who did the tanning, preparation, and binding of these books? With a few exceptions, we don’t know. How did those bookmakers feel about all of this? We don’t know. There are a few tantalizing notes, like one doctor recording that he wrapped his copy of Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinêes de l’âme in skin because “a book on the human soul merits that it be given human clothing,” but for the most part the books are silent, and the trail is cold.
This makes Dark Archives a frustrating book. Rosenbloom, a medical librarian specializing in the history of medical ethics, brings in enough weird research and morbid anecdotes about grave-robbing resurrection men and burking, and there is the obligatory chapter where we learn about leather tanning and get a craft tanner’s take on human leather. We learn about the current legal state of owning and dealing in human trophies in the United States: very complicated and specific if the body or parts in question are Native American, but extremely lax and patchwork if they are not. Corpse-desecration laws are vague to the point where a national expert on the issue was unable to say for sure if she’d be liable for keeping a skull on her desk. This makes the legal status of human skin books precarious, reliant on an uneasy combination of local jurisdiction, community interest, and institutional policy.
This leads to another important thread in Rosenbloom’s book, and one that I wish were more fully, uh, fleshed out: is it morally acceptable to keep and display books made with human remains?
This isn’t an empty hypothetical. Most of the books so far catalogued by the Anthropodermic Books Project were made with skin stripped from corpses of sick, impoverished women (and, in one of the Philadelphia cases, an African American man) for the use of wealthy, powerful doctors, all men. There is no record of consent by the deceased, and given medical ethics at the time, no reason to think the doctors would have asked for it. They took skin from dead people and wrapped their books in it.
To put it simply, any doctor that tried this today would probably lose their medical license and face steep legal penalties. They would be a pariah, and book dealers would refuse to handle the book in question. No institute would display or lend it. Even admitting to owning it would be shameful.
And yet, everywhere they are kept, anthropodermic books are hugely popular. Most of the librarians Rosenbloom interviews are exhausted by traffic generated by these books. They would almost certainly sell for a huge sum, and that value would collapse if the books were rebound in animal leather, as some librarians have called for.
Among librarians and book specialists, Paul Needham, formerly of Princeton University, has been the most vocal opponent of anthropodermic books and their display. Calling them a “post-mortem form of rape” meant to satisfy racial animus and the doctors’ “psychosexual needs,” Needham recommends stripping the bindings of most anthropodermic books and disposing of them as human remains.
Putting aside the issue of what “proper disposal” means in the case of long-dead people with no surviving kin and no way to locate their remains, this seems like a bad idea, and Rosenbloom is right to oppose it. Librarians have an obligation to preserve rare and unusual items in their collections. There need to be specific, compelling, and well-defined reasons for neglecting that duty.
Rosenbloom cites Double Fold, Nicholson Baker’s investigation into the microfiche conversion of American newspaper archives in the 1970s and 80s. Newspaper collections, librarians said, were bulky and required expensive air conditioning to maintain ideal temperature and humidity. The switch to microfilm could save libraries many millions of dollars a year in space and air conditioning costs. Entire collections were photographed, then pulped.
But microfilm, as it turned out, was a terrible, inconvenient, and fragile medium for information storage. Through bad microfilming or just material decay, hundreds of thousands of American newspaper editions were irretrievably lost. Historians now, and the uncountable generations of historians to come, will never be able to access them again.
Much is lost when we throw out original materials. Last year, I wrote about the Archimedes Palimpsest, a medieval codex holding the last extant copies of several Archimedean works, which had been erased and written over with Byzantine hymns. The Palimpsest was rediscovered a century ago, but only fully legible in the last fifteen years through computer imaging technology. Ink analysis of medieval and ancient manuscripts is a constantly-evolving field, and machine reading may yet revolutionize the translation of ancient fragments. Rosenbloom herself suggests to Needham that her work identifying anthropodermic books wasn’t even possible until a decade ago.
My point is, we still don’t know what can be found in these anthropodermic books. We don’t know who will be looking at them in the future, and why, and with what tools. We don’t know what future advances in genetics or microbiology might mean for analyzing old human skin, and what that might tell us about its owner and their times. We don’t know what cross-references might be possible as more anthropodermic books emerge, and how they might enable us to trace networks of production or distribution, or shed new light on how and why these were made in the first place. Those calling for the destruction of anthropodermic books are focused on our obligation to the past—but we owe an even bigger obligation, as philosophers have been pointing out recently, to the future, because we create its conditions and supply its materials.
“The respectful treatment of the dead,” Needham writes, “has been a central value of most human societies.” Implicit in his point is that the public display of corpses and body parts runs against those central values. But on a quick tour of European cathedrals—any one, really—one comes across endless fingers, tongues, and hair clippings of saints, the dried blood of Christ, and a woodshed’s worth of splinters from the True Cross (the OG murderabilia market, if anything is). Wikipedia tells me that no less than eight temples around the world claim to hold a tooth of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. Even China and the Soviet Union, which made a great deal of rejecting their ancestors’ spiritual hokum in favor of pure materialism, had at the center of their capitals the mummified remains of their founders. Neither Lenin nor Mao asked to be mummified and placed on permanent display for ritualistic mourning. Bodies: The Exhibition, with its skinned corpses turned into sculptures for the public, remains one of the most successful traveling exhibits of our times. And, of course, everywhere a human-skin book is found, it instantly becomes an object of scrutiny, attention, and curiosity. It is not at all obvious that immediate burial and prayer are the only way for humans to express their respect for the dead.
I agree with Rosenbloom: let the anthropodermic books stay. Don’t make any more of them without consent. Tell everybody what they are, and how they were made, and explain why this was once acceptable. Let posterity have a crack at them.
And though Rosenbloom ends with an extended aside about her postmortem plans for her own body as either an organ or cadaver donor and the preservation of a cherished tattoo, one possibility she neglects to consider the possibility of making new human skin books, certified by wills, testaments, and the rest of the legal consent apparatus that makes older anthropodermic books so creepy and unsettling. Why not wrap more of our most cherished books in our own skin, tanned and treated with the latest techniques? I can even start to imagine, gazing at my shelves, which books might make a satisfying vessel. But this is a conversation I’ll need to have with my lawyer, first.
Meanwhile, on Musement…
Switching to more of a link-based roundup for the blog has been satisfying. There will still be occasional short pieces on the Musement side of this Substack, but the weekly digest is good for managing clutter. I don’t email these blog posts out, but you can still add them as an RSS feed. Otherwise, I’ll always link recent posts to these longer, more fleshed-out Bibliophilia posts. Here’s what I’ve done since my last essay:
And since we’re now several weeks into the second year of Bibliophilia as a going concern, I’ve started sharing from the archives. Last July, I did my two-part series on Pliny the Elder and his very weird book, the Naturalis Historia:
Happy reading!