The human donors were people with little control over the destiny of their remains, from executed criminals ( here’s a book made from murderer William Burke at Edinburgh’s Surgeons’ Hall Museum) to dissected corpses (sometimes used on anatomy books, very meta) to the poor. Or as this misleadingly mundane headline from a 2006 AP article proclaims: “Some of the nation’s best libraries have books bound in human skin.”Īside from Des destinées de l’ame (meaning “Destines of the Soul”) at Harvard’s Houghton Library, there are specimens at Brown University’s John Hay Library, the National Library of Australia, the University of Georgia, the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and the Boston Athenaeum. All of these haven’t been tested, but books like this almost always have a commemorative note indicating their source. With examples going back to the 17th century, they can be found lurking in collections at many top literary institutions. The skin is thinner and rips more easily than that from sturdier hoofstock animals.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOOKS BOUND IN HUMAN SKIN SKIN
Smith discussed “anthropodermic bibliopegy” and explained one reason there aren’t more books in human skin is that it’s just hard to do. While this is quite the macabre victory in the realm of biblio-curiosities, books bound in human skin are not an unknown object. At the 2013 New York Academy of Medicine’s Festival of Medicial History & the Arts, scholar Daniel K. Director of Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory Bill Lane and Daniel Kirby at the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies stated the PMF of the book “matched the human reference, and clearly eliminated other common parchment sources, such as sheep, cattle and goat” and the data “ make it very unlikely that the source could be other than human.” This was determined through a mix of microscopic samples tested for their protein source through “ peptide mass fingerprinting” (PMF) and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry that analyzes the amino acid order, revealing species. Requiescat in pace.The edition of “Des destinées de l’ame” by Arsène Houssaye bound in human skin at Harvard (via Wikimedia) King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. “The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. One of the books includes an inscription in purple cursive: Medical professionals would often use the flesh of cadavers they’d dissected during their research. It’s referred to as Anthropodermic bibliopegy and proved pretty common when it came to anatomical textbooks. Upon further inspection, it was discovered that the smooth binding was actually human flesh… in one case, skin harvested from a man who was flayed alive.Īs it turns out, the practice of using human skin to bind books was actually pretty popular during the 17th century.
Harvard Discovers Three Of Its Library Books Are Bound In Human FleshĪ few years ago, three separate books were discovered in Harvard University’s library that had particularly strange-looking leather covers.
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