Books bound in human skin—it’s a gruesome image and one most often tied to legends of occult treatises or murderous keepsakes. But are all of the macabre legends out there really true? How can you tell the difference between leather made from human skin and that made from animals? And, historically, what kind of books have actually gotten this treatment? Megan Rosenbloom, the world’s foremost expert on the subject, explores these questions and more in her book Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, which came out back in 2020. I don’t breeze through nonfiction books quite the way I do with fiction, but I’ve long appreciated Megan Rosenbloom’s work with the Order of the Good Death and I can never resist a good book about the history of books. Though it took me a while to get around to it, I found Dark Archives to be fascinating, informative, and definitely worth the read!
In the prologue to Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom describes her first encounter with a set of anthropodermic books at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, which first sparked her curiosity about this macabre niche, and how her career path eventually led to her joining the Anthropodermic Book Project. The project aims to identify and test as many alleged anthropodermic books as possible and spread awareness while dispelling misinformation. The prologue goes into the science behind their method of testing books, which is called peptide mass fingerprinting, and sets the stage with an example of both a true anthropodermic book and a false one that the project uncovered. In the chapters that follow, Megan pairs individual books that she tested or encountered with thoughtful contemplations of the history of the practice of binding books in human skin, its ethical concerns, the cultural narratives that form around both true and false examples, and how studying these books can affect our understanding of science, medicine, death, and the legacies we leave behind. The book’s epilogue, titled “Humane Anatomy,” circles back to the Mütter Museum as Megan uses her mother’s close connection to one of the medical specimens on display there to explore the subject of empathy in the medical field.
As interesting as the human skin-bound books are as macabre literary and historical objects, what I appreciated most about this book was the extended discussion around ethics. In each chapter, Rosenbloom raises questions about agency and power as they relate to the creation, curation, and display of objects that incorporate human remains. The most common type of anthropodermic bibliopagy involves doctors who took skin as a keepsake from their (usually poor and vulnerable) patients and used it to add value and interest to a text in their personal medical library. Rosenbloom discusses the fact that these doctors saw their patients as objects rather than as full people—an attitude that has been prevalent throughout the medical field’s history, as exemplified by the treatment of and lurid means of procuring cadavers for anatomical study in the nineteenth century. Though modern medical schools have switched to a consent-based system for acquiring cadavers and have made strides in fostering an atmosphere of respect for the dead among the medical students studying them, modern universities and libraries are still stuck with the ethical questions around what to do with anthropodermic books already in their collections. Rosenbloom thoughtfully presents how different institutions have handled the dilemma and the arguments behind each course of action. She expresses her own preference for keeping such objects on display so that they can spark conversations and be learned from, but perhaps in the cases such as Harvard’s recent decision to remove the human skin binding from one of its infamous books, Rosenbloom’s Dark Archives can still serve the same purpose of preventing this history from being forgotten.
Another element I found most fascinating in Dark Archives is how Rosenbloom discusses these literary objects in terms of the narratives that surround them. For many alleged anthropodermic books, the story is all there is to them. The most salacious and shocking tales of harvesting human skin usually turn out not to be true, like the rumors of massive tanneries making products out of the skin of executed nobles during the French Revolution. Nonetheless, there were still some surprising true stories to be uncovered. In her chapter on “The Postmortem Travels of William Corder,” Rosenbloom discusses a famous true crime case of nineteenth-century England, in which a young man named William Corder murdered his lover Maria and buried her beneath the floor of a barn. I first learned of this crime through an episode of the mystery fiction podcast Shedunnit, which discussed it in the context of the fiction it inspired. The grisly tale, with its elements of love betrayed and a villain who nearly got away, was a popular subject for folk songs, performances, and penny dreadfuls. It was common in that era to take souvenirs from public executions, but the county surgeon took that to new extremes by binding a book about Corder’s trial in Corder’s own skin for his personal collection. After his trial, Corder’s body was mutilated, put on public display, copied in plaster casts, and ultimately dissected by medical students, all of which reflected the attitude of the day that the treatment of a criminal’s corpse was a continuation of the punishment the public felt he deserved. Rosenbloom contrasts this with the story of another criminal in her chapter “The Highwayman’s Gift.” This case also involved the skin of a criminal being used to bind a book related to his own crimes, but here highwayman George Walton flipped the script and took control of his own story. After dictating his confessions to a trusted warden, he then requested that two copies of the confession be bound in his own skin after his death, immortalizing his words. As Rosenbloom explains, “he subverted a symbol of capital punishment by giving his consent to it.” With these two fascinating cases, Rosenbloom demonstrates that different narratives around two very similar anthropodermic books can make us see them in completely different lights.
If you’re interested in learning more about anthropodermic bibliopagy, or even just in thoughtful discussions around medical ethics and how to handle collections that contain human remains, definitely pick up Dark Archives! You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer or buy a copy online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. (P.S. Bookshop.org now supports ebooks, as well!) If you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!