Thursday, 5 June 2014
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| Arsène Houssaye presented a copy of his meditation on the soul and life after death to a doctor friend, who then had the book covered with skin from the back of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke. / Wikipedia (via USA TODAY) |
Confirming skin-crawling news last year, Harvard’s rare-book
library reported Wednesday that a 19th-century volume about the soul and an
afterlife is indeed bound in human flesh.
In
the late 1880s, French author Arsène Houssaye presented his 315-page
meditation, “Des destinées de l’ame,” to Ludovic Bouland, a doctor and avid
book collector. His friend then had the book covered with skin from the
back of an unclaimed
female mental patient who had died of “apoplexy” — a stroke, Harvard’s Houghton
Library reported in
May 2013.
Bouland
included a handwritten note with the volume, which a book collector deposited
at the Houghton in 1934.
“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. It is interesting to see the different aspects that change this skin
according to the method of preparation to which it is subjected. ...”Using a technique
known as peptide mass fingerprinting, Harvard’s expert said Wednesday that they were 99.9% certain the
binding is human and not parchment made from sheep, cattle, goats — or apes.
The
novelist/poet Houssaye’s ultra-human work is the only one of its kind at
Harvard.Another human-bound book that Bouland noted, from the 17th
century, resides at the Wellcome LIbrary in London.
In
April, Harvard announced that
a 17th-century Spanish tome in its law school library was bound in sheepskin, not
human flesh as initially suspected.
The
binding of books in human skin — known as anthropodermic bibliopegy — dates to
at least the 16th century, while the tanning of flesh of homo sapiens who were enemies,
criminals or heretics may stretch back to the ancient Scythians.
In
the 19th century, bodies of executed criminals were routinely donated for
medical education, and their skins were then given to bookbinders and tanners.
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