The macabre version of “Des destinees de l’ame” was deposited at Houghton Library in 1934 by a book collector and given to the library permanently 20 years later by the collector’s widow. “Termed anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin has occurred at least since the 16th century,” it said. “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” he wrote.Īlthough binding a book in another person’s skin may seem creepy nowadays, the library says it was not always so unusual and reviled. Bouland left a note in the volume explaining what he had done. Ludovic Bouland, bound the book “with skin from the unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke,” the library said.ĭr. Scientists and conservators carried out a series of tests on Houghton Library’s copy of the French writer Arsene Houssaye’s “Des destinees de l’ame” and concluded with 99.9 per cent confidence that the binding material came from a human.Īccording to the library, Houssaye presented the text, described as “a meditation on the soul and life after death,” to one of his friends, a book-loving medical doctor, in the mid-1880s. A 19th-century book kept in one of Harvard University’s libraries is bound in human skin, experts say.
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