Dark Archives
A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin
by Megan Rosenbloom
2020
Dark Archives is a surprisingly chatty account of the author's work to date with the Anthropodermic Book Project, an effort, first to verify through scientific testing, and then to catalog, every book with a human skin binding. It's a pretty morbid topic! But Rosenbloom is an upbeat narrator. And while she's aware of the macabre fascination some people have with these objects, her main interest is learning who made these books, whose bodies were used, who collected them, and most importantly, why?
One thing we quickly learn, as we follow Rosenbloom on her travels, is that there are probably a lot more books rumored to be bound in leather made of human skin than there are actual books bound this way. She doesn't receive permission to test every book she visits, but of the ones she tests, something like ½ to ⅔ are fakes, just animal leather with an aura supplied by salacious rumor. At the time of her writing, only about 50 were verified worldwide, an unknown percentage of an unknown total. But the fakes are all quite old. Often a library, or a series of collectors, has spent over a hundred years thinking something that turned out to be false, usually because someone a century ago wrote a note on the book itself with the claim. You can't tell by looking; the leathermaking process eradicates any visual indicators.
The peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) test that Rosenbloom and her colleagues use was developed at Harvard in the early 2010s, and allows the identification of leather based on a grain-of-rice sized sample, even when DNA testing is impossible. The test doesn't distinguish sex or race, can't even tell humans from other apes, but can definitely determine if something is made of cow, pig, goat, or whatever, or a human. (The one possible source of error would be a false positive generated by a person handling the sample before it was tested.)
When most people guess what sorts of books might be bound in human skin, they think of the occult - books about magic, demons, witchcraft. Historically, people have also sometimes slandered their enemies by claiming that they made books out of human skin. White colonists in America claimed this about Natives, and royalists claimed the French Revolutionaries did no on a factory scale. The most common anthropodermic book though, is a book on human anatomy, owned by a gentleman doctor around the time of the start of modern clinical medicine and surgery, who had access to the skin through his work, and used it on a book he already treasured, probably to make it more valuable as a collectible by using the rarest possible material. The typical current owner is the rare books' section of a medical library.
It's not that there are no occult or 'sexy' books bound in human skin, but there are very few. None of the rumors about Natives or French Revolutionaries that Rosenbloom tested turned out to be true. There are also persistent rumors about the Nazis. And like, there are ways the Nazis commodified the bodies of their victims on an industrial scale, such as collecting gold teeth, and, I learned, making felt from human hair. One SS officer's wife at the Buchenwald concentration camp may have made a lampshade from human skin, though if so, it seems to have been destroyed before the war ended. There are photos and even museum exhibits that use stand-in lamps while repeating this claim, and viewers probably sometimes think they've seen the real thing. One museum owned a particularly grotesque lamp they never displayed, and feared it might be made with human skin. Rosenbloom and the PMF test determined it was cellulose, the plant fiber used to make film for movie cameras, much to the museum's relief.
I'll admit that part of me wishes all the rumors were false, that historically, the desire to do something like that never once coincided with the skill needed to do so. But what Rosenbloom's research so far reveals is that the 'evil geniuses' who turn human bodies into books are just doctors, and the 'evil empires' that facilitated these acts are the US and England. If there's evil here, it's mostly banal, the result of the routine and dehumanizing prejudices of the sort of wealthy White men who mostly became the early doctors colliding with the unfinished norms and anemic ethics of the early days of scientific medicine in the 19th century.
Also, nearly all new books in those days were sold as text blocks that the customer was responsible for having bound into a finished hardback, and rare book collectors routinely rebound old books to suit their own asthetic preferences. Even having the skill and material, and lacking any restraint to stop them, I think even fewer (of the already few) doctors would've done this if the book technology at the time didn't facilitate it too, which is probably why there almost no anthropodermic books from much earlier or later.
So a lot of Dark Archives ends up being about the history of medicine. Dissecting cadavers is an invaluable way to learn anatomy, still used today, and it's one reason scientific medicine is so much more effective than earlier techniques - it's based on direct observation of real human bodies. A lot of the time, getting the bodies involved grave-robbing. In England, dissection after death was an additional punishment added to the sentence of some criminals. Later, poor people's bodies were used instead (which they initially found intolerable.) It's not until well into the 20th century that the prior consent of the deceased became enshrined as an ethical principle.
Part of learning this way involves a certain amount of emotional detachment and desensitizing. We wouldn't have many surgeons if they all felt like they were committing assault or inflicting torture. But understandable as all that is, the way the rest of us think about the dead and the correct way to honor them means that it's not ethical to take skin from a dead person and use it as a raw material. The laws around this aren't always clear, but the feelings of the public haven't actually changed much over the past 200 years, with the biggest change being a positive one, that fewer of us see any of our fellow humans as being equivalent to animals.
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