The Macabre Truth About Books Bound In Human Skin

For the vast majority of people, the idea of anything made out of human remains is a serious taboo. Sure, different individuals, families, and cultures may lay out different rules for how to dispose of human remains. You may know of someone who keeps a loved one's cremated remains in their home, for instance, or you could already be familiar with the Victorian practice of making memorial jewelry out of the deceased's hair. But, while objects like urns and bracelets are meant to memorialize a person who's now gone, they're hardly presented as curiosities or sideshows. Contrast these loving, sometimes solemn remembrances with tales of far less respectful ways of dealing with human remains. For example, there are the terrible stories of atrocities committed during the Holocaust, including soap and lampshades made from human fat and skin, respectively. (It's worth noting that for all the awful things perpetrated by the Nazis, these particular rumors are highly controversial and aren't fully substantiated, says Haaretz.)

Within this unsettling world, there is one object that seems to hold particular interest: books bound in human skin. This practice, known in academic circles as anthropodermic bibliopegy, may sound too gruesome to really be true (via the Anthropodermic Book Project). Yet both reliable historic records and scientific testing prove that, sometimes, the rumors really are true. Here's the macabre truth about books bound in human skin.

According to "Bibliologia Comica," stories about human skin books go as far back as medieval Europe. The stories, practically all unverified, maintain that some collections held books that had been covered in flayed and preserved human skin. However, it's critical to note that no one's uncovered these almost mythical volumes, least of all offered them up for scientific testing to confirm their origin.

Some other early accounts of human skin books arise from the French Revolution. This 18th-century uprising against the ancient regime of France's monarchy was awash in blood and chaos. During the worst days of the revolution, it must have seemed as if people were being beheaded left and right. Certainly, if both the king and queen of France could lose their heads, then anyone might be subject to the same fate. What's more, beyond the undeniable public horror of the guillotine, there were whispers of even worse things that went on behind closed doors. Per Lapham's Quarterly, some claimed to have seen gory workshops wherein corpses of the condemned were processed for, among other things, their skin. Somewhere, perhaps in a revolutionary's private collection, there was a book bound in the hide of an enemy of the republic. Yet again, no direct evidence of these shops has surfaced, leading many to believe that they are instead the product of frightened rumor-mongering during an especially violent place and time in human history.

Lest you think our skin is anything special, it doesn't look all that different from animal hide when it's been tanned and stretched across a book's binding. This has led to quite a few misidentified books, whispered about by librarians and patrons, unsure if the book they're handling belonged to someone else in more ways than one. The truth, in many cases, is that the stories are too shaky to stand up to reality. That's because the scientific investigation of quite a few purported human skin books shows that they are actually bound in non-human animal skin (via Lapham's Quarterly). While there are certainly some human skin books out there, the fantastical stories associated with some are larger than life and not necessarily verified.

Take the case of one book that was supposedly owned by Christopher Columbus. As Notre Dame Magazine reports, it was said to be bound in the skin of a "Moorish chieftain." The story, which came through a dubious chain of book traders in the early 20th century, became a favorite of Notre Dame students, tour guides, and other curiosity-seekers. Newspaper accounts of anthropodermic bibliopegy were even glued to the inside cover of the book. Yet, when librarians consented to have the book's bindings tested, the collagen in the binding appeared most likely to have been sourced from a pig. Likewise, another supposed example of anthropodermic bibliopegy at Harvard was found to come from another barnyard animal: a sheep.

Some of the most striking tales of books bound up in preserved human skin are linked to notorious criminals. Being turned at least partially into a volume that outlined one's heinous misdeeds was seen by some as a uniquely gruesome — if fitting — punishment. At least it was for the likes of William Burke. As one half of the infamous Burke and Hare duo, he helped supply human remains to the anatomists of 19th century Edinburgh. According to the University of Edinburgh, Burke and Hare typically worked with Dr. Robert Knox. Only while other so-called "resurrectionists" dug in local graveyards, Burke and Hare's supply was fresher. They're believed to have murdered 16 people, whose remains they then sold to Knox's anatomy school.

After his 1829 execution, Burke's remains were publicly dissected, as the BBC reports. At this point, some amount of his skin was removed and later turned up around a small book, now in the possession of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Burke's skeleton and death mask are also on display in Edinburgh, as the University of Edinburgh reports. The anatomist who dissected him even dipped a pen in the criminal's blood and wrote a sentence out in the stuff. As for Burke's accomplice William Hare, there's no clear evidence of what happened to him, though it's possible he was also executed. Perhaps there's another ghoulish book out there with something more than his name on it.

As it turns out, quite a few of the confirmed examples of human skin books are medical texts. Mary Lynch's skin was used to bind "speculations on the mode and appearances of impregnation in the human female," for instance (via Mütter Museum). That points pretty obviously to the sort of people who made these books. They weren't criminals themselves, nor were they muttering occultists. Instead, they could well have been your local doctor.

Though, as The New York Times reports, human skin books were never as common as some tales would have you believe — they were created by a preponderance of medical professionals. But why were doctors more likely to be behind these gruesome works of literature as opposed to, say, bookbinders? For one, they had greater access to the raw materials. They were also arguably more inclined to hold patients at an arm's distance, using that level of removal to see the human in front of them as more of a set of conditions or materials instead of a living, thinking being. It's also worth remembering that medical ethics is a fairly new field. When many of these books were assembled in the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea of getting consent — or of suffering any real consequences for failing to do so — appears to have skipped doctors' consideration entirely.

Let's say you're a rare books librarian with a suspected example of anthropodermic bibliopegy in your collection. You offer it up for scientific examination and soon learn that the peptide mass fingerprinting has confirmed the rumors: you've got a human skin book on your hands. Now what? The next steps in this process have proven highly contentious in the world of anthropodermic bibliopegy. Ultimately, you need to either keep the book in your institution's collections or dispose of it.

Some researchers, like Megan Rosenbloom, maintain that we should keep these books around, no matter how much they creep us out. In fact, they may be even more important because of that very fact. According to her, they remain useful not just for research purposes but also as a reminder that even seemingly "normal" people in trusted positions can do unnerving things (via The New York Times). Others argue that these books should be treated like any other human remains and given a decent burial or cremation. Consider William Corder, the 19th-century murderer whose skin was harvested after his execution and used to bind a book. As the BBC reports, a descendant of his successfully lobbied for the return of Corder's skeleton remains from the Royal College of Surgeons, though his scalp and the book covered by his skin remained in academic hands. So far, the decisions are generally left to the librarians and curators in charge of these exceedingly strange volumes.