Shave any good books recently?
Posted on 01/07/2006 1:44:19 PM PST by wagglebee
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- Brown University’s library boasts an unusual anatomy book. Tanned and polished to a smooth golden brown, its cover looks and feels no different from any other fine leather.
But here’s its secret: the book is bound in human skin.
A number of prestigious libraries—including Harvard University’s—have such books in their collections. While the idea of making leather from human skin seems bizarre and cruel today, it was not uncommon in centuries past, said Laura Hartman, a rare book cataloger at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland and author of a paper on the subject.
An article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from the late 1800s “suggests that it was common, but it also indicates it wasn’t talked about in polite society,” Hartman said.
The best libraries then belonged to private collectors. Some were doctors who had access to skin from amputated parts and patients whose bodies were not claimed. They found human leather to be relatively cheap, durable and waterproof, Hartman said.
In other cases, wealthy bibliophiles may have acquired the skin from criminals who were executed, cadavers used in medical schools and people who died in the poor house, said Sam Streit, director of Brown’s John Hay Library.
The library has three books bound in human skin—the anatomy text and two 19th century editions of “The Dance of Death,” a medieval morality tale.
One copy of “The Dance of Death” dates to 1816 but was rebound in 1893 by Joseph Zaehnsdorf, a master binder in London. A note to his client reports that he did not have enough skin and had to split it. The front cover, bound in the outer layer of the epidermis, has a slightly bumpy texture, like soft sandpaper. The spine and back cover, made from the inner layer of skin, feels like suede.
Zaehnsdorf probably left the covers plain to showcase the material, Streit said.
Brown’s other “Dance of Death” edition, done in 1898, is more elaborately decorated with inlays of black leather and a gold-tooled skull. But a closer examination reveals the pores of the skin’s former owner.
The story, Streit said, is about how death prevails over all, rich or poor. As with many of the skin-bound books, “there was some tie in with the content of the book,” he said.
While human leather may be repulsive to contemporary society, libraries can ethically have the books in their collections if they are used respectfully for academic research and not displayed as objects of curiosity, says Paul Wolpe of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
“There is a certain distancing that history gives us from certain kinds of artifacts,” Wolpe said, noting that museums often have bones from archaeological sites. “If you had called me and said these are books from Nazi Germany, I would have a very different response.”
The Boston Athenaeum, a private library, has an 1837 copy of George Walton’s memoirs bound in his own skin. Walton was a highwayman—a robber who specialized in ambushing travelers—and he left the volume to one of his victims, John Fenno. Fenno’s daughter gave it to the library.
The Cleveland Public Library has a Quran that may have been bound in the skin of its previous owner, an Arab tribal leader. Pam Eyerdam, head of the library’s fine arts and special collections department, said he may have wanted to immortalize himself.
“People kept their family histories written in Bibles, and what is a Quran?” she said.
Many of the volumes bound in human skin are medical books.
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia has four bound by Dr. John Stockton Hough, known for diagnosing the city’s first case of trichinosis. He used that patient’s skin to bind three of the volumes.
“The hypothesis that I was suggesting is that these physicians did this to honor the people who furthered medical research,” Hartman said.
It’s not clear whether the patients knew what would happen to their bodies. In most cases, the skin appears to have come from poor people who had no one to claim their remains. Hough’s patient was a 28-year-old Irish widow.
“Chances are she was very poor,” Hartman said. “I don’t know the family situation, but maybe no one came to claim the body?”
In most cases, universities and other libraries acquired the books as donations or as part of collections they purchased.
An alumnus donated the anatomy book to Brown. A 1568 edition of Belgian surgeon Andreas Vesalius’ “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” it was a primary anatomy text for centuries and is still used by classes, Streit said.
The Harvard Law School Library bought its copy of a 1605 practice manual for Spanish lawyers decades ago, for $42.50 from an antiquarian books dealer in New Orleans. It sat on a shelf unnoticed until the early 1990s, when curator David Ferris was going through the library catalogue and saw a note, copied from inside the cover, saying it was bound in the skin of a man named Jonas Wright.
DNA tests were inconclusive—the genetic material having been destroyed by the tanning process—but the library had a box made to store the book and now keeps it on a special shelf.
“We felt we couldn’t set it just next to someone else’s law books,” Ferris said.
How novel.
It's a new way of fiction things.
Right. They did a nice job with the movie.
I think it goes under the brand name 'Soylent Green'.
That's food for thought.
Before me as I write lies an inch-square bit of brown leather — not, you would think, an inspiring subject for a tale. But perpend. This fragment of human skin, for such it is, has been since 1829 in the possession of three persons only: the original owner, my grandfather, and myself. Inconsiderable in size and unimpressive of aspect, it was nevertheless potent to influence the direction of my future studies. While yet a small boy, my grandfather would often shew me by request his singular relic and I never wearied of hearing how he came by it. As a matter of history, its first proprietor, the late Mr. William Burke of Edinburgh, in the circumstances hereafter to be related, was publicly anatomized, his carcase thereafter flayed, his hide tanned, and his skeleton by order of Court preserved in the Anatomical Museum of Edinburgh University, where it remains as a memorial of his infamy even to this day. Mr. Burke’s integument being cut up into sortable parcels to suit buyers’ tastes and exposed for sale by private bargain, my grandfather, who was then but a young man, invested in a modest shilling’s worth. Wealthier purchasers bought larger lots — I have heard that the late Professor Chiene had a tobacco pouch made of this unique material. Personally, despite my predilection for crime, I prefer indiarubber. My grandfather kept his portion coffined in a wooden snuff-box; it was shrouded in a yellow scrap of paper, bearing in his autograph the contemporary inscription: “Piece of Skin tan’d from the Body of Burke the Murderer.” (As I grew older I plumed myself on my superior orthography.) Thus in my blameless childhood did I first hear the horrid story of Burke and Hare.— Sir William Roughead, The West Port Murders.
Disagree.
If the results of research performed in unethical, even murderous, ways can be used to prevent or treat future human suffering, I think it is entirely legitimate to use it. Surely those who died would prefer that their suffering not be entirely in vain.
The story of the Bible is largely one of eventual good coming from temporary evil.
Maybe if we could refine DNA testing to identify the skin donors, we might be able to charge their descendents any late fines that might have accrued.
Shave any good books recently?
Mr. Costanza's not going to like that pic you know:).
I haven't shaved any books lately, been hairy busy though.
So what book would YOU like to be the cover of one day?
Cliff Notes on it? HILARIOUS!!! (And I agree.)
So what book would YOU like to be the cover of one day?
THE INVISIBLE MAN for me. You wouldn't need to see anything to read it.
Last line of Tie Me Kangaroo Down by Rolf Harris.
"So he tanned me hide when I died Clyde and left it hangin on the shed."
Selling books like these would put a lot of dollars into the necronomy I think.
I can see a future cable show...on the intersection between tatooing
and book binding...
(and am repulsed at the thought it could actually happen)
What better way to honor the victims of that evil than to use their deaths to save the lives of others? Simply throwing out the research would be worse, in my mind, because the people who were tortured and killed would have died for nothing.
I hope the scrapbooking people don't take it up anytime soon.
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