Anthropodermic Bibliopegy – Books Bound in Human Skin
Books are a generally happy and wholesome topic that most people who aren’t Kanye West agree are interesting, valuable, or otherwise just generally positive elements in our lives.
I very recently wrote a lengthy article about Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press and, despite its enormous impact on European life and the trajectory of the world thereafter, how unoriginal and uninspiring the idea actually seems to me.
A considerable section of the article, which you can and should read here, was dedicated to the evolution, history, and value of writing, writing materials, and books.
As you surely know, books and paper can be made out of different materials including countless different plant fibers in the form of papyrus, amate, rice paper1, among others, or animal hides that create parchment or vellum or…
…you know, human skin.
Wait, that’s not just an Indiana Jones-type-movie thing?
No, it’s really not.
While quite rare, throughout history there have been a small number of books bound and covered with human skin. This practice is called anthropodermic bibliopegy and yeah, it’s pretty much exactly as gross as it sounds.
The Anthropodermic Books Project is a research initiative dedicated to determining authenticity, history, and decoding the mysterious nature of books bound in human skin. Their work is actually really fascinating, so if you’re into this kind of thing I’d recommend checking out their website.
The group has thus far cataloged 49 existing books that were believed to have been bound in human skin. Of those 49 books, 30 have been successfully classified with 18 being confirmed as actual examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy and 12 turning out to be “conventional” animal leather.
The team determines the authenticity of the binding using a couple techniques, some more gnarly than others.
According to the Anthropodermic Book Project, the researchers use a process called “peptide mass fingerprinting.” PMF can detect mammalian attributes in collagen-based materials.2
Another clue they use is the counting and distribution of of hair follicles.
Kinda like Exhibit A:
Provided by Harvard University, Copyright
Yes. This nightmare fuel of a book has goosebumps, and now you have them too!3
This is a copy of Des destinées de l’ame by Arsène Houssaye, and according to the Harvard Library, which keeps it in its collection, it was gifted, around 1880, by the author to one Dr. Ludovic Bouland, a book collector in Strasbourg who had it bound in skin taken from the back of an “unclaimed” French woman who died suddenly of apoplexy.
I don’t consider myself the most squeamish person in the world, and I find this stuff incredibly interesting in an ultra-morbid sense, but can you imagine holding that thing, feeling the little bumps and reading from it like it’s no big deal? Shivers.
Maybe they’re just misunderstood?
While it all sounds quite macabre – these books were not actually supposed to be the work of freakish Jack the Ripper-style serial killers taking human trophies, but were mostly created for medical and research purposes. There have been speculations and suggestions that there are books bound in human skin that were created for occult or even erotica purposes4, but there isn’t much hard evidence to support this.
One of the best examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy has to do with the hide of William Burke, the grislier half of the Burke and Hare murders, a serial killing spree that resulted in 16 deaths in Edinburgh in 1828. The two men, Burke and William Hare, discovered that less-than-above board academic institutions and doctors would pay a premium for harvested human organs or cadavers while asking very few questions about their source.
Let’s just say that the two men made a killing.
The entire case, capture and trial are interesting in themselves and if you’re interested in finding out more you should click this link before I digress into the totally irrelevant.
After his capture and execution by hanging, Burke’s body was then publicly dissected by a team of surgeons at the University of Edinburgh – an event so popular that there was a riot when they ran out of tickets to sell and students started pushing and shoving to get in.
You know you’re hated when students are literally fighting to go to class on dissection day.
His skin was flayed and used to bind a small notebook, which, along with his skeleton, remains on display at the university to this day.
Here it is!
William Burke’s death mask and pocket book, Surgeons’ Hall Museum, Edinburgh, image by Kim Traynor. Copyright: CC BY-SA 3.0
Perhaps even more notorious, however, is the tale of James Allen, a New England bandit who in 1837, upon his deathbed, requested that after he die that he be flayed and his skin turned into the binding for the confessional book that he penned himself, extraordinarily titled: Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison.
You know that Burley Grove was seriously trolling when he titled that book.
The book was intended to be a weird gift to a man named John Fenno, one of his past victims who had the nerve to fight back, earning Allen’s admiration. It is on display at the Boston Athenæum.
Who said there’s no honor among thieves?
They’re not as old as you think.
The vast majority of Anthropodermic books date from the mid to late 19th century but even extend into the early years of the 20th and were – perhaps surprising to many – largely made in the United States at medical schools.
There were rumors during the French Revolution that someone had opened up an actual tannery (where they make leather) for human skin outside Paris like something straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Thankfully, there is scant evidence that this was ever true.
You may (or may not if you’re a weirdo?) be pleased to know that of all the known cases of Anthropodermic bibliopegy, none have been confirmed to have been associated with foul play. The books were bound with remains from those who died of natural causes, often willingly donated their bodies to science, or were executed criminals (Ok, so maybe that’s a little foul depending on your politics, but you know what I mean). These bodies were typically dissected for medical research or educational purposes.
One of the things I find both interesting but also a little bit unnerving is that the bookbinders who bound these things were, in many cases, so good at their craft that you probably couldn’t tell the difference between books bound in human skin and those bound in traditional animal leather.
Here’s a very fine example of anthropodermic bibliopegy that any book lover would be happy to own if they didn’t know what it was made from:
A book in the Wellcome Library bound in human skin. From the Wellcome Collection gallery, CC BY 4.0
You can find this rather elegant book at the Wellcome Library in London.
Conclusion
Despite the spooky nature of books bound in human skin, they are somewhat misunderstood. While these tomes do evoke images of Lovecraftian horrors, creepy medieval, Vlad the Impaler-style occultism and movies about rich Poe-esque serial killers taking sick human trophies to line their ornate bookshelves, the truth is a bit less terrifying.
I still can’t quite comprehend the actual reasoning, medical or otherwise, behind anthropodermic bibliopegy. It still reminds me of a bygone era of globalism, absinthe, occultism, absinthe, and revolutions in medicine involving absinthe. Nevertheless, it’s pretty interesting stuff.
The majority of known anthropodermic books are still housed in university libraries and museums in the United States and if you happen to be nearby, they can be seen at places such as Brown University, which holds four, and College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which maintains a collection of five. Cincinnati’s public library is also home to one, as is Harvard University. In Europe, many are in private collections or are not on display, but one can be found at Brussels’ Royal Library of Belgium, if you’re in town and are a strange person.
So, for those of you lying in bed right now after midnight, in the dark, with nothing but the warm glow of your phone illuminating your face: no, you did not imagine seeing a book with actual goosebumps.
Sleep tight!
Apex-editor of Languages Around the Globe, collector of linguists, regaler of history, accidental emmigrant, serial dork and English language mercenary and solutions fabricator. All typos are my own.
