For those of you not familiar with Anthropodermic Bibliopegy here is a picture of a fine example of this slightly disturbing art form...
Yes, that's right, it's the craft of binding books......in human skin. One of the earliest mentions of this macabre practices was as far back as 1710 by Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (honestly, I didn't make that name up) in Bremen, Germany, He wrote 'There seemed to be nothing remarkable about it, and you couldn't understand why it was here until you read in the front that it was bound in human leather.' Nice. The practise seems to become a subject of interest throughout the 19th century where most examples date from. A few still exist today but they are a rare find for obvious reasons, mainly 'where did you get that human skin from?' In a recent examination of 50 supposed human skin books only 13 turned out to be real.
Because the tanning process often destroys DNA, it's very difficult to identify the "donor." This means that inscriptions and historical records are the most common ways to identify them. So how can you tell if you've got some human leather instead of pig skin? Well, human skin has a different pore size and shape than pig or calf skin and apparently a strange waxy smell.
Many were made from the skin of executed criminals, the Bristol record office in the UK holds a book bound in the skin of the first man to be hanged in Bristol goal. 18-year-old John Horwood was hanged for the murder of Eliza Balsum. After his execution his body was publically dissected and his skin used to bind the papers of the inquest. The cover is embossed with the words 'Cutis vera Johannis Horwood' which means 'the actual skin of John Horwood'.
Probably the most famous example of these book is a pocketbook made from the skin of infamous murderer William Hare, played by Andy Serkis in the 2010 film burke & Hare. Rather than digging up corpses to sell to the local medical school, which would have been backbreaking work, they decided it was easier to just kill people instead. They dispatched 15 people before they were caught. No one knows who made the book, only that part of his skin went missing during the public dissection of his corpse and a while later the book turned up for sale in Edinburgh.
An article in JAMA Dermatology (JAMA Dermatology is a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association) featured a short examination of a book, along with a call for greater study of books of this kind. They wrote 'On examination of the bookbinding, numerous follicular ostia are clearly visible and provide a raised, coarse texture to the front and back covers," Harvard dermatologist Vinod Nambudiri writes. "The pages are gilt-edged. The bookbinding has an even, golden-brown background hue. Focal areas of darker brown pigmentation likely reflect variation in the literal 'skin tanning' process underlying the binding’s production and consequences of handling over the book’s existence rather than melanocytic proliferations in the native skin based on examination with epiluminescence microscopy."
This is a close up of the book “Des destinees de l’ame,” by Arsène Houssaye.
The book below tells the story of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and is covered in the hide of Father Henry Garnet. The Jesuit priest was executed May 3, 1606, outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London for his alleged role in a Catholic plot to detonate 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath the British houses of Parliament.
The book is called “A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings Against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet a Jesuit and His Confederates,” and it contains accounts of speeches and evidence from the trials. It measures about 6 inches by 4 inches. When it came up for auction in 2007 it fetched £5400, Sid Wilkinson, an auctioneer of such things, said: “The front cover is rather spooky because where the skin has mottled or crinkled there looks to be a bearded face. He added that it was common for the skins of executed criminals to be used to cover books about their lives.
I'll leave you with this...
Comments