![]() While rumours persisted for decades about the provenance of books like Hough’s, it wasn’t until 2014 that a new analytic method allowed researchers to separate real anthropodermic books from the rest. The grotesque custom, Rosenbloom writes, embodied “The worst of what can come from the collision of acquisitiveness and clinical distancing.” Other bibliophile doctors also helped themselves to skin from dead patients, sending the samples to professional tanners for preservation - a practice that revealed their lack of respect for their patients as human beings. Decades later, Hough, an avid book collector, used the preserved skin to cover several of his favorite books on female anatomy. In the late 1800s, an upstart physician named John Stockton Hough harvested skin from the thighs of Mary Lynch, a woman who had died penniless of a combination of tuberculosis and trichinosis. The blade of a doctor’s scalpel, Rosenbloom observes, was often the prime instrument of this desecration. The books’ “very ordinary appearances,” Rosenbloom writes, “mask the horror inherent in their creation.” Part of her goal in documenting anthropodermic books’ origins is to restore dignity to those whose remains were sewn into bindings. (By claiming a volume was bound in skin, book dealers of yore could juice their profit margins, creating ample incentive to lie.)Īuthentic specimens, though rare, take on outsized importance because they betray a human willingness to obliterate consent, and even personhood, for aesthetic or supremacist ends. The Anthropodermic Book Project, of which Rosenbloom is a member, has identified only 18 books to date that live up to their human-skin billing. Still, it appears so far that impostor skin books outnumber real ones. ![]() Lovecraft short story features “ a locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin,” and a skin-bound volume drives the plot of Chuck Palahniuk’s 2002 novel Lullaby. Human skin-covered books have captivated literary audiences for centuries: A classic H.P. As Rosenbloom crisscrosses the globe to confirm the purported origins of skin-bound books - a cracking detective story in itself - her journey offers unusual insight into what defines informed consent, what separates homage from exploitation, and how power disparities can breed casual inhumanity. It’s easy to assume this topic is too restricted or too gruesome for a book of its own, but Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, proves that assumption wrong. This copy of Houssaye’s masterwork had a singular distinction: At the time, it was the only book on the planet proven to be bound in human skin.įor Rosenbloom, a librarian at the University of California, Los Angeles, the trip served as her entrée into a field she’d studied for years: “anthropodermic bibliopegy,” the practice of binding books in human epidermis. ![]() In 2015, Megan Rosenbloom traveled to Harvard University’s Houghton Library in search of a book called Des destinées de l’âme (‘ Destinies of the Soul‘), by the French author Arsène Houssaye. Photo: Wellcome Library/Wikimedia Commons Ludovic Bouland that states the book is bound in human skin. ![]() A 17th century book with an inscription from Dr. ![]()
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