By Emily Bach, WPAMC Class of 2022

Overview

An old adage muses that one should never judge a book by its cover and yet, historically, binding materials were purposefully chosen and often aligned with a book’s contents or purpose. A book cheaply bound in paper-covered boards could signify a temporary binding while a bible encased in supple leather and embellished with gilded tooling denoted its spiritual importance. Bookbinders and customers had a variety of options from which to choose — sheepskin, calf, goat, cloth, vellum, and wood. On rare occasion, however, someone chose a more peculiar binding material — human skin.

Most current scholarship resides in the virtual world of blog posts associated with museums, universities, and the Anthropodermic Book Project, the leading initiative in identifying extant human skin bound books. The team uses an innovative science called Peptide Mass Fingerprinting, or PMF, that tests for specific amino acid sequencing unique to each mammalian source. Currently, there are fifty supposed anthropodermic books that exist and of these, the project has tested thirty-one. With the application of PMF science, the project has confirmed that of the thirty-one books examined, eighteen are actually bound in human skin.

Such a small number of surviving anthropodermic books highlights the rarity of these anomalously bound books. Despite this, however, references to these macabre books existed in the sixteenth century and the practice reached a peak in popularity during the late-nineteenth century. Early scholars of this subject have attempted to uncover the mythological and historical origins, such as Lawrence S. Thompson with his 1949 work, Religatum de Pelle Humana, and Rigby Graham in his 1965 article “Bookbinding with Human Skin.” Thompson recollected a multitude of fables and ancient myths considered to involve human skin leather, including the tale of northern abolitionists spreading propaganda that claimed slaveowners tanned the skins of enslaved men and women to bind their family bibles. Graham continued this search for origins by referencing prisoners who were skinned as punishment, people who desecrated graves and skinned the corpses of those they admired, and erotica novels bound in women’s breasts.

Figure 1. This detailed image shows the pores, and even possibly a mole, of Mary Lynch’s skin. Image courtesy of the The College of Physicians of Philadelphia Digital Library, https://www.cppdigitallibrary.org/items/show/4380.

With the introduction of PMF technology and definitive identification of anthropodermic books, contemporary scholars, in contrast to Rigby and Graham, have dedicated their writings to interpreting these books to answer the questions that naturally arise when contemplating this subject: Who created these books and why did they choose this material? What genre of text was typically bound in this macabre material? Who was the willing and, more often than not, unwilling donor? According to medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris, people chose human skin to cover their texts for three major reasons: collections, punishment, and memorialization.

Books confirmed as anthropodermic are often associated with the human condition and became valuable relics for collectors. The Historical Medical Library located within the Mütter Museum of Philadelphia houses the most extensive collection of human skin bound books. Of its five confirmed titles, three were bound in the skin of Mary Lynch (Figure 1), a widowed Irish immigrant who, on July 15, 1868, was admitted as a tuberculosis patient at Old Blockley, Philadelphia’s almshouse. Unfortunately for Mary, after eating pork products contaminated with trichinella spiralis, a parasitic roundworm that attacks the intestines and circulatory system, she tragically passed away on January 16, 1869.

Figure 2. Dr. John Stockton Hough’s inscription in Speculations on the Mode and Appearances of Impregnation in the Human Female. His note details how he acquired the skin and when he tanned it. Image courtesy of the The College of Physicians of Philadelphia Digital Library, https://www.cppdigitallibrary.org/items/show/4380.

Dr. John Stockton Hough autopsied her and confidentially removed skin from her thigh, which he tanned into leather. He did not use her skin, however, until 1887 when he bound three books, Speculations on the Mode and Appearances of Impregnation in the Human Female (1789), Les Nouvelles Découvertes sur Toutes les Parties Principales de l’Homme et de la Femme (1680), and Reveuil des Secrets de Louise Bourgeois (1650). Each of these books dealt with female health, conception, and reproduction. As Megan Rosenbloom wrote in her article “A Book by Its Cover: The Strange History of Books Bound in Human Skin,” Hough’s exploitation of Mary Lynch’s condition reflected a larger trend in anthropodermic bibliopegy of doctors being the ones who wielded the knives. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, doctors enjoyed newfound wealth and authority. With this growing prestige, possessing an exceptional rare book collection visually proclaimed a doctor’s knowledge and status. Hough was no different, as exemplified by him waiting almost twenty years to use Mary’s tanned skin for medical tomes related to female anatomy.

Another collector, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, also partook in the phenomenon of binding books in human skin to increase their perceived value. In the mid-1880s, French writer Arsène Houssaye presented Bouland with his book Des Destinèes de l’Ame, which is now housed within Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Bouland completed the book’s binding in human skin because of its philosophical reflection on the human soul. Within the text, he inscribed:

This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman…

Both Hough and Bouland demonstrated how skin was often acquired without consent. Books confirmed as anthropodermic inherently commoditized the human body as people viewed them as extremely valuable and desirable due to the uncommon material.
Another reason for anthropodermic bibliopegy was the implementation of punishments that ensured a criminal’s eternal humiliation and accountability. England’s Murder Act of 1751, for example, ordered not only the execution of convicted murderers, but also denied them proper burial. Removing a criminal’s skin and using it to craft objects provided a way to keep the body above ground. On display at the Surgeon’s Hall Museum in Edinburgh is a pocket book constructed from the skin of William Burke, a serial killer who murdered sixteen people in 1828. Similar to collectors’ human skin bound books that contemplated the human soul and body, punishments that resulted in the creation of objects or book covers from a criminal’s skin materialized the person.

Lastly, anthropodermic bibliopegy also related to the memorialization of the deceased because these objects physically represented the body. At the Boston Athenaeum Library survives the Narrative of the Life of James Allen (1837), an autobiographical account that chronicled the crimes of a man named James Allen. Before his death, he requested that his skin be used to cover two copies of his book as gifts to his doctor and the one victim who stood up to him. While this is one specific example, generally all books bound in human skin memorialized the deceased person in one way or another, whether intentionally or not. Anthropodermic bibliopegy reveals important themes of exploitation, commoditization of the human body, associations with valuable collectables, memento mori practices, and punishments, all of which are reflected by the covers we’re so often told not to judge.

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Diagram of an Anthropodermic Book

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Glossary of Terms

Annotated Bibliography

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