The book is The Highwayman, which is the story of the life of James Allen, alias George Walton. The most famous of anthropodermic bindings is kept at the Boston Athenaeum. And physicians sometimes used human skin to bind medical books, having found the material to be “relatively cheap, durable, and waterproof.” Speculation is that the physicians may have bound their books in human skin to honor the people whose bodies helped to further medical research. The skin of criminals was used as binding for books that recorded their wrongdoings. The practice was almost commonplace by the 19th century. Some of the early books known to be bound in human skin are copies of the French Constitution, bound in the skin of members of the new republic’s opposition. A French Bible from the 13th century is one of the earliest examples. ![]() The history of this grisly craft, known as anthropodermic bibliopegy, goes back at least as far as the Middle Ages, when human skin parchments began to appear. ![]() Harvard’s three books, one of Roman poetry, another on French philosophy, and the third on medieval law, date back to as early as 1605. Examples of human-skin bound books can also be found in Brown University’s library, the Langdell Law Library, the Houghton Collection, and the Countway Library of Medicine, among other major libraries. Harvard is not the only library with such specimens. Harvard library’s books bound in human skin came to light in 2006, but interest in this macabre collection has returned over the past few days.
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