The practice
of binding books with human skin, tanned into leather, is one frequently met
with in discussion of dread tomes of the Mythos. To modern readers the concept
is one calculated to cause revulsion and a frisson
of fear and many horror writers have toyed with the notion of their heroes and
heroines unknowingly perusing a book only to discover the tattoo, nipple, or
face starting out at them from the leather binding. 300 years ago, however, the
fact of a book bound with the skin of another human being, while unusual, was
not considered altogether strange.
Throughout
Britain and Europe from the early 1700s, it was fairly common – depending upon
the severity of the crime – for murderers’ bodies to be handed over, after
their executions, to anatomists and other medical investigators for the purpose
of extending medical knowledge, particularly in the areas of identifying other
possible felons, through the pseudo-science of phrenology, for instance. The
knowledge that dissection awaited them after the gallows caused many criminals
extra distress, and this was often seen as appropriate, given the heinousness
of their deeds. It was a frequent occurrence that the doctor, who took charge
of the body, prepared a portion of the skin after flaying and provided it to
the publisher who printed the transcripts of the trial: the skin would be used
to bind the account which would then be deposited with the court records.
Accordingly, books bound in human leather were relatively common.
The most
well-known instance of this practice involved the famous murder trial known as
the Murder in the Red Barn, which
fired the imaginations of the English populace in 1827. The crime involved a
young woman, Maria Marten of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, who tried to coerce a
local ne’er-do-well, William Corder, into marriage. During a clandestine
meeting in the infamous barn, an argument resulted in the woman being shot
through the eye; William Corder hastily buried the body and disappeared to London,
where he married another woman and began a new life. The girl’s family assumed
that she had eloped and was with William Corder and resigned themselves to life
without her. Unfortunately, Maria Marten’s ghost purportedly appeared to her
sister in a dream and showed her where the body was hidden: soon, agents were
sent out to find the culprit and, after a massive trial which attracted
thousands of spectators, William Corder was declared guilty and sentenced to be
hanged and thereafter dissected. In due course, his flayed skin was used to
bind the court reports of his trial. This book is still on display in Bury-St.
Edmunds today.
During the
height of the Terror in the French
Revolution, the practice took on an even more macabre tone and having one’s
skin used to bind the evidence of one’s crimes and the justice effected, was
seen to be just desserts for the aristocracy: it was a means of adding insult
to injury under the new order and of increasing the sense of horror for those
who fell victim to it. In the madness of these events, along with famous
artists using the fresh blood of guillotined victims for their canvasses, some
books were bound in the flesh, not just the skin, of the victims; but these
often started to rot and had to be disposed of.
Increasingly,
towards the 1900s, the instances of binding with human skin became fewer and
further between. There are reports of people making provisions in their wills
for copies of their memoirs to be bound in their own skin and a few cases of
friends and associates binding books with their loved ones’ skins as a memorial
to them: Harvard University’s Langdell
Law Library contains a copy of Practicarum quaestionum circa leges
regias Hispaniae, a work of
Spanish law, bound in human skin. The last page of this book contains
the following inscription:
“The
bynding of this booke is all that remains of my deare friende Jonas Wright, who
was flayed alive by the Wavuma [a tribe from Zimbabwe] on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Btesa did give me the book, it
being one of poore Jonas’ chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin
to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.”
Some medical
texts were published where the authorial doctors used their wives’ or patients’
skins to commemorate their status as a muse, but by this time the whole notion
was becoming rather unpleasant and the Freudian implications of this type of
published material gained little public acceptance. The Wellcome Library for the
History and Understanding of Medicine has a copy of a series of gynaecological essays bound by its owner, a
Doctor Ludovic Bouland who died in 1932, in the tanned skin of a woman which he’d
kept from his days as a student of medicine, prior to 1865. He felt that the
binding “should match the book’s subject matter”.
In the
Twentieth Century, tales were rife regarding the Nazi’s use of the skins of
concentration camp victims for book leather, wallets and for lampshades, most
notoriously by Ilsa Koch, known as the “Bitch of Buchenwald”. While it is known
that the Nazis did keep specimens of
skin taken from prisoners, where elaborate, or smutty tattoos were present (and
these were used as evidence at Nuremberg), there is no hard evidence to support
these other stories and they must be regarded as urban legends, or at most,
isolated incidents. Nevertheless, the fact of these ‘horror stories’
underscores the low regard in which the practice of human-skin book-binding, or
‘anthropodermic bibliopegy’, is held.
The skin of
human beings when used to bind a book is prone to drying and flaking if not
kept in good condition; according to those in the know, well-preserved
anthropodermic bindings feel like fine suede. The effect is very similar to
pigskin and often the two leathers are confused: pigskin however, can be
identified by the fact that the hair follicles - where detectable - are present
in groups of three, forming a regular pattern of triangles across the surface,
while human hair follicles present differently. DNA testing can also be used to
determine the origin of a sample of leather but, occasionally, the tanning
process can denature the proteins sufficiently such that a result may often be
inconclusive.
Tales of
horror and suspense, regardless if their historical milieu, are aimed at an audience and calculated to gain an effect
from those to whom it is exposed. Nowadays, for instance, if Sam Raimi tells us
in his Evil Dead stories that the “Necronomicon ex Mortis” is bound in
human flesh, he is sure to get a squirm of disgust from his viewers; three
hundred years ago, his audience may not even have noticed...
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