Weird Island

9. BOOKS IN HUMAN SKIN: Anthropodermic Bibliopegy

Episode Summary

There are FOUR books bound in human skin in the John Hay Library. The collection includes an influential anatomy book written in the 1500s, two copies of Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death (also published in the mid-1500s) and a work of sensational mid-1800s popular fiction. All four books were rebound in the 1800s and have been scientifically verified. To Visit: John Hay Library | 20 Prospect Street, Providence, RI 02912 | See: Andreas Vesalius’ Fabrica, Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death, and Adolphe Belot’s Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife Boston Athenaeum | 10 ½ Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108 | See: Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman Check out these other stories: Dr. John Stockton Hough’s 4 Skin Books (verified) Book on the Pituitary Gland said to be bound in the skin of “circus giant named Perky” (unverified) Joseph Leidy’s Anatomy Book in the Skin of a Civil War Soldier (verified) Milton’s Poetry bound in the skin of murderer George Cudmore (unverified) The Horwood Book bound in the skin of murderer John Horwood (unverified)

Episode Notes

Episode Source Material:

Anthropodermic Books:

Hans Holbein:

Andreas Vesalius:

M. Adolphe Belot:

Burke and Hare:

The Worlds of Burke and Hare

James Allen

Narrative of the life of James Allen : alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the highwayman : being his death-bed confession, to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison. - Rare Books -

History of Anatomy

Episode Transcription

Hi! You’re listening to Weird Island, and I’m your host, Sara. Each week I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up, from my tiny little state of Rhode Island. This week, I’ll be telling you about four books bound in human skin that are tucked away in a library in Providence.
Has it ever occurred to you that if leather can be made from animals like cows and sheep and pigs, then it could probably also be made from humans? No? Yeah, it never occurred to me either.
But it occurred to someone. Or, really, it occurred to multiple people. And those people were like, you know what I’d really like to add to my rare book collection? A book bound in human skin leather. One person was even like, okay, human leather is a little bit over done. Let’s make it human suede. I’m sure you’re picturing something grotesque and wrinkly and maybe… hairy? But the truth is, these books could be sitting on a shelf with other leather bound books and you’d never be able to pick them out.
Admittedly, I think these morbid creations are really interesting--and hopefully I can convince you to feel the same way--but I was thankful to hear that books bound in human skin were not considered common at any point in history. Today, only around 50 are thought to exist, and only 18 of those have been proven to really be human. And of those 18, four of them live here in Rhode Island, in Brown’s John Hay library. So just under 25% of the scientifically proven human skin books in the world exist in Rhode Island. That feels appropriate.
The collection in Rhode Island includes an influential anatomy book written in the 1500s, two copies of Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death (also published in the mid-1500s) and a work of sensational mid-1800s popular fiction. All four books have been scientifically verified.
Books bound in human skin are called Anthropodermic books - and the art of human book binding is Anthropodermic Bibliopegy. When you break down the words to their Latin roots--Anthropos - Human; Derma - Skin; Biblion - Book; Pegia - To fasten--you literally translate the phrase to Human Skin Bookbinding.
I’m sure you’re wondering why these books came to exist. Well, many point to the French Revolution as the beginning of the history of the Anthropodermic book. During and after the Revolution, there were rumors that a castle in ruins in the town of Meudon, sitting on a slope overlooking Paris, had been secretly converted into a tannery. But not just any tannery--these rumors claimed the skins of those who were executed were used to make the leather that would equip soldiers of the Republic, and Generals were said to wear trousers or boots made from human hide. It was thought that human leather books were another product of this venture.
In fact, if you google the history of these books right now, you’ll find a ton of sites and blogs confidently claiming human books were made during the French Revolution, but that’s likely untrue. While those rumors were fairly persistent at the time, today most scholars and Meudon’s historical society generally consider them to be propaganda. There’s no definitive evidence of human tanneries - and the majority of anthropodermic books were bound later, in the mid-1800s.
But with that being said, the French Revolution still may be integral to the history of the anthropodermic book. Megan Rosenbloom, author of “Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin,” details how the French Revolution marked a turning point in the professionalization of medicine, one that changed the way medical patients and the human body were treated.
The study of anatomy first began to flourish in the 1600s. Dissections of cadavers became more common and public interest increased dramatically. Only certified anatomists or barber surgeons were allowed to perform dissections, and sometimes only once a year. The city would sponsor public dissections and charge admission, and crowds packed into anatomy theaters to witness the event.
Sometimes these dissections took on a circus-like air. In Bologna, some audiences would arrive wearing Carnival masks. An anatomy college in Padua brought in a troupe of musicians to play during one dissection. Often, debates would break out between rival scholars and the crowds could get rowdy. It sounds pretty cheary, considering a human being was being cut apart. But criminal executions provided the source of the bodies, so onlookers likely felt little remorse in delighting in the spectacle.
As these events gained popularity, demand for cadavers to dissect increased -- leading to a shortage of bodies. There simply weren’t enough executed criminals to supply all of the anatomy theaters and medical schools that popped up throughout the 16 and 1700s. In England, the government increased the number of crimes for which you could be hanged, but still demand exceeded supply.
But of course, when there’s demand for something, people will find a way to supply it, and a lucrative body snatching trade cropped up, where people would steal bodies from graves and sell them to medical schools. These body snatchers were called resurrectionists or resurrection-men, and this remained a common practice through the early 1800s.
Amidst this backdrop, the French Revolution took place, and Paris--the largest continental European city at the time--was in a different position. Instead of having a shortage, the city had an abundance of patients and cadavers, potentially contributing to the city’s later position as a leader in medicine. While previously dissections and surgeries and other medical manual labor were performed only by barber surgeons, not doctors, the high casualties and lack of qualified surgeons meant medical students had to start helping out, resulting in an emphasis on hands-on experience in medical teaching. And as the Revolution came to an end, the Republic firmed up this legacy by requiring stricter guidelines around education and training for medical students. This significantly increased the number of patients doctors saw, and shifted the doctor-patient relationship away from a focus on individual patients towards a focus on symptoms, disease and organs instead of people.
Additionally, as private medical schools peaked in the 1820s and 30s, anatomy acts began to be passed to cut down on body snatching. These acts provided for the legal dissection of unclaimed bodies of the poor from workhouses and charitable hospitals and a rising class of gentlemen doctors might have felt pretty disconnected from the people they were dissecting.
So, now we had more dissections performed by students and doctors who were seeing an increased number of patients, and medicine was becoming more impersonal. Inevitably, reverence towards bodies and body parts was rapidly declining in the medical field.
So, where do these human skin books come in?
Well, like I mentioned, doctors were a rising professional class - and one great way to distinguish yourself and note your status is to become a collector of fine art and books. It was fashionable in the 1800s for collectors to have books rebound--and at least a few of these book-collecting doctors preserved skin from their patients which was later used to bind copies of their own work or work they admired.
Megan Rosenbloom writes, “ If I were a doctor and book collector and I had a rare, old book, and I have access to this very unusual binding material that’s an anatomical dissection, then I would use that binding to make it extra special. That was the doctor-bibliophile connection.”
So the anthropodermic book likely wasn’t a direct product of the French Revolution and secret human tanneries, but was instead linked to the rise of the doctoring class. But, with that being said, I have to mention that there is one anthropodermic book that still needs to be tested that could potentially change that conversation. There is a copy of the French Constitution of 1793 that is allegedly bound in human skin, and while it hasn’t been tested yet, if it is proven true, it could be the first piece of evidence of a human skin object from the French Revolution. But, it could be years before we get that answer.
The field of Anthropodermic Biocodocology - or the study of books bound in human skin -- is incredibly young. Megan Rosenbloom, who wrote Dark Archives, also joined forces with two chemists and the curator of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia (which is home to five anthropodermic books) to create the Anthropodermic Book Project, with the goal of identifying and testing as many alleged anthropodermic books as possible.
So far, they’ve identified about 50 alleged human skin books, and they’ve tested 31, using a process called Peptide Mass Fingerprinting that identifies species-specific marker ions extracted from collagen. This process is not very specific. It can’t distinguish between skin from men or women. It can’t tell where the person might have come from or who they might have been. But it can tell whether the skin came from a sheep, or a goat, or a pig, or a cow, or a member of the great ape family, like a human. But because humans evolved from apes so recently, it actually can’t distinguish between human skin and ape skin. However, there are no known accounts of books bound in ape skin, so it pretty definitively confirms that the material is of human origin.
Right now, only 18 books have been confirmed to be human. And like I mentioned, 4 of those confirmed books are in Brown’s John Hay library.
One is a copy of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, written in 1543 by Andreas Vesalius, that translates to, “On the Fabric of the Human Body.”
Vesalius came from a long line of physicians, but his father was illegitimate, so he needed to make a name for himself to fulfill his wish of becoming personal physician to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. And he certainly did. Vesalius is commonly referred to as the founder of modern anatomy. While previous textbooks had been small, with crude images, Vesalius’s book featured beautiful, intricate wood block prints with skeletons posed out against landscape backgrounds. The high quality made it an instant classic.
Vesalius sounds like an interesting character. When he was a student, it’s said he visited cemeteries and he and his classmates would blindfold themselves and try to identify the bones they found. Later, he would actually perform some of his own dissections, at a time when medical doctors were not expected to do manual labor. And these dissections may have even been done on bodies he procured himself. Vesalius would admit to being a grave robber. With students in tow, he would break into tombs and steal bodies, and once his students admitted they flayed the skin of a female cadaver so her family wouldn’t recognize her during the public dissection. He would also negotiate with judges to turn life sentences into death sentences so he could get access to the bodies of more criminals. It’s fitting then that his work was rebound in human skin in the famous book binding house of Josse Schavye in 1867 to be presented at the Paris International Exposition. The brown cover of the book is adorned in a gilded, Renaissance style, and the binding is signed with Schayve’s seal and a mention of the Exhibition of 1867.
The identity of the skin, as is the case with most anthropodermic books, is unknown. It’s thought that two anthropodermic copies of the book might have existed at one point--the first one, after being displayed at the Paris Exposition, was subsequently owned by a Belgian physician and bibliophile before being sold in 1874. It eventually made its way to the US and into the collection of William E. Louttit, Jr, a graduate of Brown and bibliophile who later became the first keeper of records at the John Hay Library. The other rumored copy was apparently never sold, and remained in Schayve’s private collection until his death. It later seems to have been owned by the royal family in Belgium, but went missing over the years.
The John Hay collection also includes two copies of another book, Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dance of Death. The Danse Macabre genre was popular in the late Middle Ages, and consisted of the dead, or a personification of death, summoning those from all walks of life to dance along to the grave to illustrate that death unites us all. Holbein’s work, which features beautifully detailed wood cut imagery drawn between 1523 and 1525 and published in 1538, redefined the genre. His images show death intervening in moments of everyday life, and instead of taking a comical approach, Holbein’s figures respond to death more realistically. He also infuses the genre with humanistic beliefs about justice and abuses of power.
The first anthropodermic copy of the book was bound in 1893 by Joseph William Zaehnsdorf of London, a famous bookbinder from a lineage of bookbinders. Inside the copy is a memorandum typed on Zaehnsdor’s letterhead that reads,
“Dear Sir, The copy of 'Dance of Death' which I sold you a short time since was covered in human skin. Unfortunately as the book was rather large, and the material for covering rather scanty, I was obliged to split the leather in two: the result of this is that the skin which is quite smooth is on one side [front cover], and the rough unfinished skin is on the other [spine and back cover]. The material which covers this book is from exactly the same piece of skin. Yours obediently, Zaehnsdorf”
The book also included a newspaper clipping, from a 1936 column titled, “From a Paris garret,” which notes that the book was sold at auctions, and describes it as being “made from the skin of a woman.”
The second copy was rebound sometime between 1898 and 1903 by Alfred J. Cox of Chicago. In a 1903 exhibition of curious bookbindings, it was described as “white human-skin, inlaid with black morocco, and tooled with arrows, death’s heads, and knuckle-bones. American binding of the 19th century.” Like with Vesalius’ anatomy book, the choice to bind Holbein’s Dance of Death in human skin appropriately alludes to the content of the book itself.
But, the final book in the John Hay collection is a little bit of an outlier. It is a copy of the 1891 translation of a work of fiction titled, “Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife” by M. Adolphe Belot. Although largely unknown today, Belot was a prolific and best-selling author in the 1800s, and he specialized in scandalous works of fiction. This book tells the story of a suffering naive young man who’s new wife will not agree to consummate their marriage. Eventually, he learns from an acquaintance that their wives are lovers. The book was both very popular and very controversial at the time of its publication, but it has now been out of print for over a hundred years. Why was this book bound in human skin? Was it at the request of another doctor bibliophile, who maybe saw a chance to allude to the lesbian couple in the book by binding it in a woman’s skin? Or was it something else?
Rosenbloom mentions that people often ask if these skin-bound books ever have erotic undertones--and on the whole her response it that they typically don’t. Not overtly. But perhaps this one does. In an article titled, “In the Flesh? Anthropodermic Bibliopegy Verification and Its Implications,” the author writes, “this example gives unfortunate credence to the more dubious claims of erotic works bound in skin from a woman’s breast.” That’s not to say that it is--bound in the skin of a woman’s breast. But, there are rumors that it’s happened…
While I’ve emphasized the importance of the doctor bibliophile in the production of anthropodermic books, that’s not the only reason human leather books were created.
I mentioned that public dissections were initially done on the bodies of criminals. Well, some of these criminals were made into books as well, as a way of further punishing their actions and creating an example out of them. There were also some notable examples of voluntary donors, who requested that they be made into books (though admittedly voluntary donors make up a very slight fraction of the books -- most of the human bodies were used without consent).
While Rhode Island doesn’t have any examples of these criminal bound books, there are a few that exist. One is the Boston Athanaeum’s copy of, “The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen,” which is an example of both a criminal and a voluntary donor. Allen was a Massachusetts highwayman--a robber who stole from travelers, and the actual book title goes on to list his many different aliases. After a long life of crime, Allen was imprisoned in the Massachusetts State Prison, where he later died. But before dying, he made a deathbed confession and autobiography and asked that a copy be bound in his own skin and presented to a man named John Fenno. And who was Fenno, you ask? Maybe a relative? A close friend? No, this was a man Allen had once tried to rob. Fenno fought back, and Allen so admired his bravery that he requested the anthropodermically bound confession be delivered to him. This is also the human suede (rather than leather) book I referenced earlier.
There’s another interesting criminal anthropodermic book, but this book is untested as of today, so keep that in mind! Authenticity is unknown, but the story is still very fun.
In the early 1800s, Edinburgh was a leading center of anatomical study, and of course, cadavers were in short supply. A man named William Hare ran a lodging house called Tanners Close, and one day a lodger died. Hare turned to his friend, William Burke for advice. The lodger hadn’t paid his debts and Hare was counting on the money. Burke offered up a pretty good solution. Why not sell the lodger’s body to an anatomical lecturer to recover the debts? So Hare and Burke sold the lodger’s body and split the money. Later, another lodger fell ill, and Hare started to worry that the illness might deter others from staying in his establishment. So he and Burke killed the lodger and, again, sold the body. It turns out this was a pretty lucrative undertaking, and they got a little greedy. They committed fully to masquerading as body snatchers, while actually being serial killers.
By the end of the year, the two had killed 16 people. They were caught when two lodgers noticed another lodger was missing, and later found her body hidden under the bed. Burke and Hare were arrested, but Hare and his wife turned King’s Witness. Burke was sentenced to death and executed in 1829, then publicly dissected. It’s said some of his skin went missing, and later a small brown pocket book turned up for sale, rumored to be made from his skin. Today, the book is kept in Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh, but it hasn’t been tested as of recording this.
There are so many more incredibly interesting stories behind the other anthropodermic books known today. I’d love to keep going, but it’s so much to cover. If you’re interested in hearing more, check out Dark Archives. Get the audiobook version, it’s super interesting and accessible and short and you’ll hear about a bunch of stories I wasn’t able to cover.
And in that book you’ll also hear a lot about something I didn’t touch on much here. And that’s the ethics of these books. So many of them were created without consent, using the bodies of involuntary donors--many of whom died poor in workhouses or in mental hospitals, and their bodies were sold to medical schools without consideration of their human dignity. Today, all four of the works at the John Hay Library are considered human remains, and are not on public display. Access is limited to treat them with care, respect and dignity. But you can call to request a viewing.
And while you’re there, you can also check out the library’s other artifacts, books and files, including one of the largest comic book collections, a Lincoln collection, an HP Lovecraft collection, and a Henry David Thoreau Collection amongst many others.
Thanks for listening! If you liked this episode, please leave a rating or review, or you can send me a note at Weird Rhode Island at Gmail.com. And if there’s a topic you’d really like to hear about, let me know! See you next week as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island. Until next time!