By Lawrence Hammar
How much do you really know about the books you love? Any bibliophile will tell you that a rare book is far more than the sum of its parts. And parts is parts, right? But who founded and set the type-faces that made the penned manuscript readable? Who made the inks and how? Where did the paper come from, and how was it made? Who did the stitching, sewing the leaves “gathered” into “signatures” and then stitching those together into a text-block? Can one judge a book by its cover?
Book bindings have varied over the millennia, from rolled parchment to linen cloth, from wood slabs to sheet metal, and from one kind of treated animal hide—vellum, if you must know—to another, from sheep and goat to horse and calf leather. Some books are bound in human skin. You read that right. “Anthropodermic bibliopegy” is the technical term. Houghton Library at Harvard University, for example, has long safekept a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l'âme, first published in 1879. The book’s first owner was a French doctor and bibliophile by the name of Dr. Ludovic Bouland (1839–1933). It was common in the early-mid 19th century to buy printed text-blocks and then have a favored book-binder turn it into a work of art, sewing the text-block into a handsome binding, tooling it with gilt lettering and designs. Dr. Bouland bound his copy of Houssaye’s text with skin he took without consent in the 1860s from the body of a dead woman, a female patient at his psychiatric hospital in France. At some point Dr. Bouland inserted a hand-written note into the volume, stating that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.”
In 2023, the Houghton Library reviewed its stewardship of this volume, removed the human skin binding, and placed it into temporary storage. They’ve had the book since 1934, when the “gift” was deposited by John B. Stetson, Jr. (1884–1952, Harvard Class of 1906). The Library’s rare book specialists employed “peptide mass fingerprinting” to confirm the human origins of the book’s binding. It will take months, maybe years, more precisely to nail down the binding’s original owner, a poor, likely exploited French woman. Roughly two dozen books in existence currently are confirmed to have been bound in human skin.
The Narrative of James Allen, a nineteenth-century highwayman in Massachusetts, contained a request that his memoirs be bound in his own skin and then gifted to John Fenno, whom he had tried unsuccessfully to rob. Before being bequeathed to Boston’s Athenaeum, it is argued to have been in the Fenno family home for a couple of decades; Fenno is said to have used the book with which to spank his children. The Narrative of James Allen is perhaps the only known copy of a human skin-bound book, a book bound in its own skin of consent.
Lawrence Hammar
Books Will Speak Plain. Reach me at: svafinebooks@gmail.com or http://www.svafinebooks.com.
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