In June of 2014, Har-vard Uni-ver-si-ty’s Houghton Library put up a blog post titled “Caveat Lecter,” announc-ing “good news for fans of anthro-po-der-mic bib-liop-e-gy, bib-lio-ma-ni-acs, and can-ni-bals alike.” The occa-sion was the sci-en-tif-ic deter-mi-na-tion that a book in the Houghton’s col-lec-tion long rumored to have been bound in human skin — the task of whose retrieval once served, they say, as a haz-ing rit-u-al for stu-dent employ-ees — was, indeed, “with-out a doubt bound in human skin.” What a dif-fer-ence a decade makes: not only has the blog post been delet-ed, the book itself has been tak-en out of from cir-cu-la-tion in order to have the now-offend-ing bind-ing removed.
“Har-vard Library has removed human skin from the bind-ing of a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s book Des des-tinées de l’ame (1880s),” declares a stren-u-ous-ly apolo-getic state-ment issued by the uni-ver-si-ty. “The volume’s first own-er, French physi-cian and bib-lio-phile Dr. Ludovic Bouland (1839–1933), bound the book with skin he took with-out con-sent from the body of a deceased female patient in a hos-pi-tal where he worked.” Hav-ing been in the col-lec-tion since 1934, the book was first placed there by John B. Stet-son, Jr., “an Amer-i-can diplo-mat, busi-ness-man, and Har-vard alum-nus” (not to men-tion an heir to the for-tune gen-er-at-ed by the epony-mous hat).
“Bouland knew that Hous-saye had writ-ten the book while griev-ing his wife’s death,” writes Mike Jay in the New York Review of Books, “and felt that this was an appro-pri-ate bind-ing for it — ‘a book on the human soul mer-its that it be giv-en human cloth-ing.’ ” He also “includ-ed a note stat-ing that “this book is bound in human skin parch-ment on which no orna-ment has been stamped to pre-serve its ele-gance.” This copy of Des des-tinées de l’ame isn’t the only book rumored — or, with the pep-tide mass fin-ger-print-ing (PMF) tech-nol-o-gy devel-oped over the past decade, con-firmed — to have been bound in human skin. “The old-est reput-ed exam-ples are three 13th-cen-tu-ry Bibles held at the Bib-lio-thèque Nationale in France, write the New York Times’ Jen-nifer Schuessler and Julia Jacobs.
Jay also men-tions the espe-cial-ly vivid exam-ple of “an 1892 French edi-tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug, adorned with a skull emblem, is gen-uine human skin: Poe en peau humaine.” In gen-er-al, Schuessler and Jacobs note, the largest num-ber of human skin-bound books “date from the Vic-to-ri-an era, the hey-day of anatom-i-cal col-lect-ing, when doc-tors some-times had med-ical trea-tis-es and oth-er texts bound in skin from patients or cadav-ers.” Now that this prac-tice has been retroac-tive-ly judged to be not just deeply dis-turb-ing but offi-cial-ly prob-lem-at-ic (to use the vogue term of recent years) it’s up to the anthro-po-der-mic-bib-liop-e-gy enthu-si-asts out there to deter-mine whether to put the items in their own col-lec-tions to the PMF test — or to leave a bit of macabre mys-tery in the world of anti-quar-i-an book-col-lect-ing.
Relat-ed con-tent:
Old Books Bound in Human Skin Found in Har-vard Libraries (and Else-where in Boston)
When Medieval Man-u-scripts Were Recy-cled & Used to Make the First Print-ed Books
Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Man-u-script in the World
A Mes-mer-iz-ing Look at the Mak-ing of a Late Medieval Book from Start to Fin-ish
Based in Seoul, Col-in Marshall writes and broad-casts on cities, lan-guage, and cul-ture. His projects include the Sub-stack newslet-ter Books on Cities and the book The State-less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen-tu-ry Los Ange-les. Fol-low him on Twit-ter at @colinmarshall or on Face-book.
