February 28, 2017 • 57 mins
The libraries of horror fiction typically offer many a dark tome bound in human flesh, but do books like the ‘Necronomicon Ex-Mortis’ of ‘Evil Dead’ really exist? They do, and the true story of skin-clad literature will chill you. Join Robert and Christian as they crack open the history and science of anthropodermic bibliopegy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and my name is Christian Sayer. Hey, Robert,
would you read a book if you knew that it
was bound in human skin? Oh, that's a that's a
(00:25):
tough one, because it was bound in my skin. Well,
I feel I feel even more weird about it because
I'd like to be I'd like to take care of
my books and be respectful to my physical books as
much as possible. And uh, if it's a really nice book,
there's a lot of pressure, right. You don't want to
bend that fancy cover. You don't want to just leave
it sitting around. And if it's bound in human flesh,
(00:48):
I feel like I've got to go above and beyond.
I've got a lot of special Yeah, I've got to
get a special jacket for it. I've got to perhaps
put moisturizer on it. I don't know all the rules
because I don't have any books bound in human flesh.
One of the things things that I heard and read
during our research for the episode that we were about
to conduct was that apparently human skin is like any
other leather bound book, as long as you just keep
(01:11):
it at like a moderate temperature should be okay. And
for the most part, the libraries and archives that have them,
you know, they have them. Obviously, they're in special collections.
They're kept away there behind glass, or they're you know,
in boxes somewhere, but there they don't need like any
special I don't know. It's not like like you need
human skin spray to wipe down your book with, right, Yeah,
(01:33):
Because it basically comes down to the reality that that
human hide is just another hide. Granted it's one that
has a lot of a lot of personal um value
attached to it and a lot of a lot of
taboo energy associated with with its use, but it's ultimately
not that different from any other animal skin. Yeah, really,
(01:53):
it isn't um And so we're gonna talk about this
today because there's a weird history behind it. But also
there's a new science that's popped up in the last
two years to confirm whether or not a book is
actually bound in human skin. And you may be sitting
out there listening to this and saying, surely that's not
really a thing. Uh, And you know, we've all heard
(02:16):
of these kinds of books and horror movies or something, right, like,
the one that I immediately think of is the Necronomicon
Ex mort Us from Evil Dead, uh, infamously bound in
human skin. But what others, Well, well, this one's interesting
because of course you know it's very much bound in
human skin in the Evil Dead movies. Yeah, but the
(02:37):
neverrica necronomicon is that originally appears in HP Lovecraft's writings.
I don't believe was ever mentioned as being bound in
human flesh. Oh okay, yeah, yeah. In fact, there's only
one reference I could find. Maybe some some other Lovecraft
readers out there can can correct us, But the only
story I found where he makes a reference to a
(03:00):
bound in human skin is his story The Hound that includes, uh,
this description of kind of an occult stash statues and paintings.
There were all the fiendish subjects, and some executed by St.
John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound and tanned human
skin held certain unknown and unnamable drawings, which was rumored
(03:23):
Goya had perpetrated but dared not at knowledge. So there's
one reference to a book bound in human skin. But
for the most part, like it's something that turns up
in a horror fiction. Sometimes in Stephen King's Eyes that
the Eyes of the Dragon, the flag character reads from
a book of this's bound in human skin. It's implied
(03:44):
that this might be the Necronomicon. But for the most part,
I couldn't run across any specific examples of like old
school horror fiction and weird fiction that had much in
the way of of human flesh bound books. I couldn't either.
The only one that popped into my head, and I
could confirm it by quickly looking up this movie was
The Ninth Gate. Do you remember that Roman Polanski movie
(04:05):
with Johnny Depp and he had he was like traveling
around the world to get I think there were three
copies that he had to confirm if they were real
or not. That were these books that you basically used
to summon a portal to Hell. Yes, you're speaking of
the Book of the Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows.
The book that this was based on was The Club
Duma by AUTHORO Perez ROBERTA. Yeah, yeah, I read this
(04:29):
many years ago, so I've forgotten most of it, but
I remember it being pretty fun. I looked back in
it a little bit for this episode, and I it
appears that in the book at least it was bound
in um seventeen century Venetian binding, and there were three
copies of this sixteen sixty six demonology text sixteen sixty six.
It was a good year for the hmonomy, but three
(04:53):
copies survived the Inquisition, and in the story um two
of those copies contain elaborate forgeries. So you only have
one volume that will actually work the others. If you
try and follow the various demonic summoning consulting spells, you're
gonna do it wrong and you might die. Yeah. That's
an interesting little movie. I've heard the books are much
(05:14):
better too. But the movie it's not a great movie,
but I weirdly come back to it every couple of years. No,
it's it's uh. I have to say that the book
might be bound in human flesh in the movie, because
I know that the movie kind of played up some
more of the demonic and horror themes. Yeah, whereas the
(05:34):
book kind of kept a distance from some of that stuff.
But it's a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah, it's got
that scene with the woman in the wheelchair. That's what
I always think of when I think of that. I
don't remember that at all. She's she's dying and she's
just kind of like flailing around in like one of
those powered wheelchairs. It's it's pretty brutal. Yeah. Anyways, So
(05:54):
speaking of brutal, how about some books bound in human
skin or just skinning humans? Yeah, because that's really where
we have to to come back to. But before we
get into the utilization of human flesh, uh, in book binding,
we have to go back even further. I have to
go back far before we were binding books at all
and just talk about, well, what's the history of just
pulling flesh off of people? Do you want to share
(06:16):
a fun fact with our audience that we learn when
we're putting the notes together for this. Yeah, So if
if you if you see this phase of stuff to
blow your mind as as phase three, which I guess
I'm I'm now thinking of it as uh, phase four
is when we're all robots. But this is the This
is technically the fifth episode of the podcast to discuss
(06:37):
Human Flame, Jeff, the Killer Episode, the Incomplete Unfinished episode,
the mind Let episode, the Human Remains episode, and Cobra
Effect and the Horrors of scalp hunting and don't forget
mind flares, they don't flay skin, but that there is
a at least the word flame. Yeah, so it's it's
(06:59):
a five point five. Yeah. So the just the flaying
of humans as barbaric as it is has been around
for quite some time. UM. I was looking at one
particular text, uh, when we're when we're researching this, and
this is an older publication, but it was from Lawrence S.
Thompson writing for the U. S. Department of Agriculture in
(07:23):
he has this whole uh paper, this whole chapter tanned
human skin, and he says that the mere tanning of
human hides obviously goes back much further than book binding.
For instance, Herodotus wrote about the Scythians and their cultivation
of this art. If you will. In Saxon, Britain, certain
(07:44):
offenders could pay hide geld for their crimes. So I
guess that would be essentially paying so you would still
be alive, but you would give parts of your skin,
or it would be like a I'm going to be executed,
but in payment you will be able to take miss skin.
I'm not I'm not certain on this because on one hand,
I'm I'm wondering if it's if it means that you
(08:05):
would pay a little actual guild so your hide would
not be taken, or if it's kind of um, you know,
you're basically paying for your your crimes with a piece
of your skin. Um. Also, he also mentions that Danes
who committed sacrilege in churches could be flayed and their
skins nailed the church doors, which seems seems a little
(08:26):
sacrilegious to put a human skin on a church door.
It seems like you're you're punishing the crime with another crime.
But that's just my modern sensibilities, I guess. Well, and
that's what we're gonna learn in this episode two is
that a lot of this comes down to what is
taboo nowadays versus what was two hundred years ago, three
hundred years ago, and further back. Really we're talking about
(08:48):
the medieval and Renaissance period when this was at its height,
but the last I think the last recorded one was
in the late nineteenth century. Yeah. And then one of
the things too about human flaying in general is that, yes,
it undoubtedly has happened, and it has been the practice
of different cultures at different times. But on the other hand,
(09:08):
it is hard work it's it's grizzly work, and sometimes
just the idea of it taking place picks up steam
and becomes part of the myth, whereas it might not
and it might not have actually happened. Like, for instance,
there's a legend of jan Zika, the Hussite military commander,
and apparently the legend is that his dying wish was
(09:28):
that drums may be made from his his skin so
that he could continue to lead his troops in battle
in some fashion. And you know who, who knows if
there's any truth to that at all, but the story, uh,
certainly resonated with everyone. And that's kind of part of
what this this new scientific practice is all about, because
there's so many stories and legends about, oh, this book
(09:51):
is bound in human skin, and you know, you can't
really tell it first glance, and we're gonna talk about why.
But turns out, like a lot of these old archives,
when you actually test their books, they don't always turn
up as actually being made of human skin. Sometimes they're
just sheep skin or lamb skin or cow or deer
or something. Right. I mean, in some of these accounts,
even books that that definitely are made of human skin, Uh,
(10:14):
they have been described as looking like they're made from
pig skins. Yeah, yeah, So much of it is just
your expectation of and you're you're what you're you're thinking about?
Is the story regarding this think it definitely has to
do with the tanning process too. As we go through
some of the examples throughout this episode too, Like some
of them you look at them and you go, oh,
that's a part of a human being, and others you
have no idea. So then you know, I'm assuming, like myself,
(10:38):
many of you out there might not actually be familiar
with the process of tanning, and tanning human hides is
essentially similar to how you would tan other hides. But
let's go through it real quick. So there's many that
are bound. Many types of books in particular that are
bound in human skin can include prayer books, astronomy treatises,
and court cases, and then deaffinitely anatomy text, which stricts
(11:02):
me as being very meta, very wink wink, nudge nudge.
But the official name for this type of book binding
is called anthropodermic biblio peggy or page. It was mostly
done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was
primarily by physicians to bind their anatomy texts. Uh. And
in these cases it was usually human skin that was
(11:25):
claimed from medical cadavers or criminals that were sentenced to death,
but sometimes their skin was also used to bind the
record of their trials as a form of punishment after death.
And we'll explain why and some of the examples. Uh.
It was supposedly this is a rumor I think popular
during the French Revolution, uh, where there was quote unquote
(11:46):
a fresh supply of bodies available. Yeah. I was actually
reading about the French Revolution tie in and apparently royalist
propaganda from the time claimed that the revolutionary leather goods
were generated by a human leather tannery. There's one place
in particular, I think in uh mutant any U d
o n. And I'm not that great the fringe either,
(12:08):
but but yeah, that was the propaganda going around all
these revolutionaries, all of their leather comes from human flesh. Okay, well,
you know we're gonna have an example coming up that
is of a market asad book. So maybe and that
was right around that time ish, so maybe that's possible. Um,
it turns out to that sometimes these books were bound
(12:30):
in human skin. Out of affection for the author. Now
there's at least one interesting account. Yeah, this is not
necessarily that they've taken the author's skin and bound his
book in it, although I think that might have happened too.
But but more often that you send your skin to
your favorite author after you die, you have you've paid
(12:51):
ahead of time for the shipping. Uh, maybe you stamps
dot com to send your human skin, you know, I
could understand that. I mean we I feel like a
lot of us are reading ongoing series and the idea
of dying before the author finishes that series can be
a little troubling, right, So I could see like sending
a piece of your your skin to say, George R.
(13:13):
Martin exactly, Scott Baker or somebody and saying, look, I'm
not going to survive to read your book, but if
you could, maybe if I could be there in some fashion, Yeah, exactly,
And that is that's how it went down. But yeah,
I mean, essentially, what you do is you cure an
animal skin when you're tanning. You do it by soaking
it in salt and then in water, and then you
(13:33):
treat it with various chemicals that soften it up and
keep it from decomposing in some cases and in some
of the human cases we're gonna talk about urine is used. Okay, Yeah, because,
like we said, the human skin is just another animal hide.
And you know, there are accounts of tanners using human
skin and book bindings, and in these cases you can
compare many of the cuts of human hide to pig hide.
(13:56):
The pores, hair, and in some cases the nipples can
be telling, but can also just be easy to look
at it and think it's just any other type of leather.
Not something I ever really thought about before with just
you know, leather working in general, is like what what
do they do about the animal nipples? You know, like
if I have a belt or I have shoes or whatever,
(14:17):
like do they just cut around the nipples? Well, what
do they do with the nipple part? It's interesting that
this les Yeah, they do. They have, They have quite
a number of them. It seems like with with actual
leather work, there's gonna be a tendency to remove all
aspects of the creature. You don't want to be reminded
that this came from an animal. But in many of
(14:38):
these cases of human hide use, there is a deliberate
effort to make it resemble a person in some way,
shape or form. There's even one where there's an impression
of the person's face. Yeah. Really, but that's like so Necronomicon. Yeah,
that's a new show on the ABC Family. So Necronomicon.
(15:01):
Now Laurence Lawrence S. Thompson and that that the writing
that I mentioned. He writes about several non book binding
uses of human skin from some of the from this
time period, ranging from slippers to an alleged coin purse
made from a human scrotum. It was employed by a
burlesque dancer. Honestly, I'm not sure how much I'd buy
(15:23):
that because symbolism aside, who really wants to lug around
a scrotum? You know? Yeah, it seems like a lot
of work, But it also seems like maybe it's like
some kind of symbolic victory over like if she's a
burlesque dancer, maybe it was like it belonged to somebody
who had wronged her. Yeah, I mean, the story of
it makes sense, but at the end of the day,
you're left with what sounds like a pretty ugly coin purse.
(15:46):
I guess with any of these things, if it's if
it's made in a way to look like it was
it was manufactured from a human body. The appeal is
going to wear off with most collectors pretty fast. That's
the kind of that's my two cents on it. Yeah, yeah,
you're not that wrong. So why don't we take a
quick break and when we come back, we're gonna give
you just a just a pile of examples to show
(16:09):
you how real this is. Okay, we're back. So let's
talk about some notable books that were bound in human
flesh and why were they all? Right, uh, yeah, before
we get into and I just want to drive home
again the time frame we're looking at. So, according to
(16:29):
the late Age of print, everyday book culture from consumerism
to control by Ted Streyfus, the binding of books and
human flesh persisted as a practice from basically the late
eighteenth century to and he argues the conclusion of the
Second World War. Now he's like, he's largely alluding to
the allegations that the Nazi doctors used flesh in in
(16:53):
the construction of lamp shades. Oh right, Yeah, this came
up a lot in the literature and was kind of
most of the writers who were focusing on the book
binding where like the lamp shade thing is is unconfirmed. Yeah,
and it's been more importantly, it's it's not a book like,
just to be very uh specific, they're referring to a
lampshade is not a book binding. So um So I
(17:15):
don't know if that timeline exact timeline can can really
be trusted, but you could basically say that that that
was probably the last time someone could have really gotten
away with it in the in the the the sort
of learned academic sense of it. A buffalo bill too. Yeah. Yeah.
And and also, as we'll discuss at the very end,
(17:35):
there are examples of modern uh flesh usage and various
art projects, the construction of of tennis shoes made from
human flesh, that sort of thing. If you follow the
kind of social media feeds we do, if you probably
have seen examples. I feel like I shared this on
stuff to blow your mind at one point. But there
was this artist who made these shoes with human teeth. Yeah,
(17:56):
that's the one I'm thinking. Yeah, yeah, those were really bizarre.
But also, you know, for us and for most of
our listeners, kind of cool to look at. Yeah, there
was a there was a recent art project where someone
who's was planning to take the skin samples from the
late fashion designer Alexander McQueen talked about into a jacket.
Yeah so, but but even that, that's you're talking about cloning,
(18:19):
you take it's a modern spin on on on this, uh,
this older method of book binding, of utilizing human flesh
and some sort of uh, you know, quote unquote practical sense.
So before I get into this, I want to note
that one of my sources was from a blog by
a woman named Dr Lindsay fitz Harris, and she's a
(18:40):
medical historian who specializes in the history of early surgery. Uh.
And it's a fascinating blog. So if you like this
is the kind of thing you're interested in, and you
like what you're hearing, and you might want to go
check it out because she's got just lots of entries
on things like this. But let's start with father Henry Garnett.
Apparently he was a conspirator as part of the sixteen
(19:03):
oh five gunpowder plot. Many of you will know this
as now being memorialized as Guy Fox Day. He conspired
to blow up the houses of Parliament in England, and
his uh sixteen oh six record of his offenses is
bound in his skin. And this is the title of
the book, A true and perfect relation of the whole
(19:25):
proceedings against the late most barbarous traders Garnet, a Jesuit
and his confederates. Now this is you know, if you're
one of our British listeners, you're probably well familiar with us.
But for our other listeners, this is why Great Britain
celebrates the fifth of November as Guy Fox Day. It's
mostly popularized over here from Alan Moore and David Lloyd's
(19:48):
v for Vendetta, which was made into a movie a
couple of years ago. So you occasionally see folks wearing
Guy Fox masks here, but it's really like the for
Vendetta masks for them. H Garnet himself actually wasn't active
in the plot to do this, but he knew of it,
and so he was hung, and then he was drawn
and quartered before his skin was removed. Now, one copy
(20:10):
of this book, this is the one I was talking about,
has been found with an impression of his face on
the front cover, and it went for eleven thousand dollars
at an auction in two thousand and seven. That doesn't
seem like that much to me. I don't know. I
guess I'm not really in on the pricings of rare books,
especially like human skin books, but eleven thousands seems kind
(20:32):
of low, like it's less than a car. Yeah, I
don't know. I guess you it's going to be awkward
to read that book because if you're on the train
with it, people are going to be staring at the face.
You're like, do you hold the nose when you've got
the front cover opening your lap? If it's a big book, Yeah,
do I want to even put it in my lap
if it's got somebody's face on it? I don't know.
And you're really you're just reading like sixteen hundreds legal records.
(20:56):
That's ultimately a boring book. But the next one that
we should talk about, and this is the fan one
is I like to call it the French Countess. Uh,
this is the fan. So she was a big fan
of occultist astronomer Camille Flammarion, and she sent a strip
of skin from her shoulders to him after she died
(21:19):
from tuberculosis, and then he used it to bind a
copy of a book on the description of the planets
in our solar system. Yeah, it was. This was this
was fascinating. Again. This comes back to this idea that hey,
I'm not gonna be around for your next book. I
love your work, and he bind your next book in
my skin. Uh, And he did that, and it was
(21:40):
it apparently was even this is the kind of thing
that happened today. It would be in all the headlines,
right and even at the time people were asking questions.
You're like, WHOA, tell me more about this? And so
Flammarion ended up responding to one of these questions. And
I have the letter that he wrote in response. He
he says, my dear doctor, the story has been somewhat
expanded it. I don't know the name of the person
(22:02):
whose dorsal skin was delivered to me by a physician
to use for binding. It was a matter of carrying
out a pious vow. Some newspapers, especially in America, published
the portrait, the name, and even the photograph of the
chateau where the quote unquote countess lived. All of that
is pure invention. The binding was successfully executed by Ingle,
(22:23):
and from then on the skin was inalterable. I remember
I had to carry this relic to a tanner in
the rue de la rene Blanche, and three months were
necessary for the job. Such an idea is assuredly bizarre. However,
in point of fact, the fragment of a beautiful body
is all that survives of it today, and it can
endure for centuries in a perfect state of respectful preservation.
(22:46):
The desire of the unknown woman was to have my
last book published at the time of her death, bound
in this skin, the Octavo edition of The Terrorist Doucier
published by did he enjoys this, honor your reader and
admire Flammarion. So I didn't do a deep dive into Flammirion.
He might be somebody who want to come back to
(23:07):
it a later day, because he reminds me of John
d um But apparently, like when he was around, he
was known as sort of I don't crank isn't really
the right term, but he like he had like a
lot of predictions based on like his his observations of astronomy,
and I think one of them was something like Hayley's
comment was gonna crash into earth and kill everybody or
(23:28):
something like that. Like he had like a lot of
like kind of apocalyptic you know, scare tactics. Yeah. I
don't know a lot about him either, but I do
know this, Um, he believed that it was perfectly reasonable
to use a woman's skin to bind a book. I'm
a woman whose name he didn't know. Yeah, I mean,
he makes kind of an interesting argument. He's saying, look,
(23:49):
beautiful woman, she's dead, she would just be forgotten. Now
she gets to live on as part of this forever,
as long as the planets. So I don't know, all right,
but it is interesting to hear the the the author's
take on this a little bit. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Um,
I can't believe you're able to dig that up. That's
pretty cool. Um. So here's the Marquis assad book that
(24:12):
I was mentioning earlier. If you're familiar with his work,
it's copies of his work Justine. Uh So. Medical interns
apparently supplied the breasts of deceased female patients to an
English binder of erotica in the nineteenth century to bind
copies of Justine. Uh And this is so obviously more
(24:32):
than one copy of Justine. And in one example, there
is an intact nipple on the cover. And the research
article that I read about this had a picture of it. Um,
but that seems weirdly fitting for the Marquis Assad. Yeah.
I was reading about this as well, apparently, um, and
you you were able to uncover actual photographs of this. Yeah,
(24:54):
because the way I saw it described was that the
Goncour brothers, who were French writers at the time, that
they kind of gossiped that interns in the this place
the Calmer where we're dismissed because of the delivered skin
from breasts the female patients to the binder of obscene
books in uh Faull book. Saint Germain uh and then
(25:16):
publisher Isidore or Lazoo claimed to have seen the volume
that you've described here. Well, you know, this could be
one of those examples where this is legend. I mean,
of course, like so market Assad is infamous, of course,
Like if you really want to like like mark up
the value on your Marquis Assad book, you say, oh, yeah,
(25:36):
this just happens to be made from the skin of
of a mental patients breasts. Oh no, they weren't mental patients.
They were just deceased patients. The mental patients come later. Um,
but you know what I'm saying, like that this would
be one that would be great to test if they
could ever, uh, you know, get it over to this
team of scientists that we'll talk about later. Indeed, now
(25:56):
at this point, a number of our American listeners are
probably thinking, Man, Europeans of this time period, we're just
we're just kind of awful. Americans would never engage in
this sort of bizarre a book collecting grotesque ery. Not true.
We've got James Allen, who went by the alias George Walton,
(26:17):
and he was from my home state, Massachusetts, or at
least that's where he died. Uh. He was a nineteenth
century criminal who willingly donated his skin after he tried
to rob a man on the mass Turnpike. His victim
fended him off, so Alan, when he was captured, requested
that his skin be used to bind a book of
(26:38):
his crimes that was given to his victim as a
quote token of his esteem. Huh. And this is on
display at the Boston Athenaeum Library. Another book from his
skin went to his doctor apparently so he had he
had enough left over, He just said, gives him here
a little bit here. I hope everyone is really like,
the big message that I got from the research was
(27:01):
just how normalized. Yeah, this was granted not among everybody,
but in certain circles. It was the kind of thing
where you could arrest and be like, oh, yeah, I'll
want my skin to bind this book in that book.
Like today, no one would be you would just you
would just be considered a complete wacko. Uh. But I
mean maybe you were considered a whack o at the time.
We were considered a you know, unacceptable kind of whack
(27:22):
in eccentric Uh. You know, I don't know. I kind
of wonder like if any of our pathologist friends are
out there listening it, if you are used to dealing
with the dead and you're handling them and you're opening
them up and you're doing autopsies, you know, I wonder
how much further down the road it really is to
(27:45):
take the skin off. I mean, the tanning process seems
to be the hardest part about that. Although I'm you know,
I've never actually removed somebody's skin, but you know what
I'm saying, Like, like I think like once you've already
gone down the path of being, uh, someone who conducts
autopsies on a regular basis, and you're just sort of
used to the dead human body being an object and
(28:07):
not a person. Maybe it's not that far removed to
say like, well, we might as well get some use
out of this. Yeah, I mean yeah, I think that's
a perfectly valid point here, because you know, you're either
going to be a tanner who is who is who's
engaging with the hides all the time, or you were
a doctor who is dissecting criminals and and uh and
(28:30):
you know deceased patients. Yeah, that's what it seems like.
Another and so this is a famous example but also
a good example to give us an idea of why
these were conducted the way they were. And it is
Burke's skin pocketbook. Uh. This is the notorious Scottish murderer
who committed his crimes between eighteen seven and eighteen eight
(28:54):
with his associate Hair, So Burke and Hair. I think
that's a movie, right, Yeah, there was a sign Simon
Peg and yeah, Simon Peg and Gollum. I haven't seen it.
That's Gollum's real name. I feel bad, Candy Circundy Circus. Yeah. Uh,
those guys played these characters. I wonder if in that
movie version they show the book at the end. But uh,
(29:15):
so these two killed sixteen people and the reason why
I was to sell their bodies to an anatomist. Uh.
Burke was hung and then dissected, and his skin now
binds a book at the Surgeon's Hall Museum in Edinburgh. Uh.
This book is described as being dark brown, almost black,
and honestly it's not really a book. It's really kind
(29:37):
of a wallet for personal notes and money. There's no
paper between it. Uh. And why why was this done?
We're starting to see a pattern here right, Well, apparently
there was a law called England's Murder Act of seventeen
fifty one, and this stipulated that not only would a
murderer be executed, but they couldn't be buried. So they
were like, what are we gonna do with all these bodies?
(29:59):
So they what they would do is they would usually
dissect them, sometimes in public, you know, as kind of
a lecture hall series or something like that. Sometimes they
hung the bodies and chains, but some like Burke, were
made into book covers. Uh. So there you go. Another
one of these, it's kind of similar, is at the
Bristol Record Office. It's a there's a book there that
(30:22):
accounts the first man to be hung at Bristol gaul
I think that's how you pronounce it. I guess over
here we'd call it gallows. Uh. It's a guy named
John Horwood. Now, the story goes Horwood was eighteen years
old and he was infatuated with a woman named Eliza Balsam,
and he threw a stone at her while she was
fetching water, and then he quote beat her skull to pieces.
(30:44):
Uh ditto, same as Burke. He was dissected during a
public lecture, and then his skin bound the papers about
the case. So that's another place where apparently you can
you can see some of these now here. This next
example is one of the most disturbing from and it's
right here in the US of A. And you can,
in fact, uh see these books at the Mutter Museum. Uh,
(31:08):
the Mary Lynch books, as they're called. So Mary Lynch
was a twenty eight year old woman who died from
tuberculosis and parasitic infection tricken gnosis in eight she'd been
in this hospital care facility for six months, and the
physician who did her autopsy needed to remind his trio
(31:28):
of anatomical texts on human reproduction. That's how the story
is first portrayed. But then I read multiple articles about
this and got the full story. So basically what he
did was he's conducting her autopsy. He takes a section
of skin from her thigh, then he hands it in
the hospital basement. But he didn't at first repurpose it
(31:48):
for these book covers. Mary apparently only weighed sixty pounds
at the time of her death. It was apparently a
gruesome affair. He tanned her skin using a bed pan,
and they think it might have been filled with human
urine instead of the usual uh, you know, salt and
chemicals that were used. Uh. And they say this would
(32:10):
have taken two weeks to a month. This guy, who
was only twenty three years old at the time. But wait,
he holds onto her skin until eighteen eighty seven, So
nineteen years later, Uh, he decides, I'm gonna buy in
these anatomy books up uh and the three volumes are
now in the Mudern Museum. Some speculate that the treatment
(32:34):
like this shows an example of how doctors at the
time saw themselves as being social superiors to their poorer patients. Uh.
And he also published her autopsy in the eighteen sixty
nine issue of the American Journal of Medical sciences, and
apparently it included this very gruesome graphic that depicted the
(32:57):
number of parasites that were in her body during the autopsy.
So this just sounds this sounds very morbid. Yeah, there
is this sense. You do get a strong sense of
physicians here who have a godlike complex about their their
powers over the human body and and certainly to your
point there their social superiority to the poorer patients. Yeah. Yeah,
(33:22):
this is the kind of thing. It's funny because like
that's a stereotype I think of when I think of
like the nineteenth century medical man, you know. Um, but
that's mainly from entertainment, you know, I'm thinking of like,
I don't know, Penny Dreadful, right, like Dr Frankenstein, I'm
Penny Dreadful, or characters and stuff like Deadwood or something
like that. Right, Like, like doctors just were a little
(33:44):
quirky back then, at least that's what our fiction tells us.
But then we like this, Yeah, well one of the
things is you are entertainment. Of course we want our
doctors quirky. I'm gonna watch, you know, sixteen hours about
this doctor. He'd bet he or he'd better be quirky.
You know that. It's one of the reasons I love shows,
like like the nick that was going to mention after
factory and that very quirky doctor. I wouldn't want it
(34:07):
any other way. But then you look in the in
the histories and you do find these real eccentric spirits
in the medical profession. And I mean that goes back.
I mean, and that goes all the way back through
ancient times and to the age of vivisection, etcetera well,
and leads to us having characters nowadays like Hannibal Lecter.
You know, like that, it all kind of makes sense
(34:27):
when when you trace the history of it. Another example
you'll see a lot of Here is a book called
Destinies of the Soul. Oh, it is a good one.
This is a book by writer Are Scene, who say,
I believe it's how you pronounce it, and it was
given to his friend Dr Ludovic Bouland in the eighteen eighties.
(34:48):
Now Bouland is thought to have bound the book himself
in the skin of an unclaimed female mental patient who
died of natural causes. He apparently also found a sixteenth
century next on virginity and human skin. Although we don't
know where that human skin came from. So this guy's
like setting off my my creepy meter. But these books
(35:10):
are interesting, especially well really both of them, because these
are the first ones that really feel like they could
belong in a Lovecraftian library. Um. The one book in particular,
Destinies of the Soul eight, focuses on the afterlife and
theories of the human soul, and the book is inscribed
with this. This book is bound in human skin parchment,
(35:32):
on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance.
A book about the human soul deserved to have a
human covering. I had kept this piece of human skin
taken from the back of a woman. Yeah, Bouland just
really of all the people in here, he's the one
who really just kind of like squipped me out, gave
(35:53):
me what do you call it, um, chill bumps. Yeah,
Now that would be interesting to have a book. But
I guess the Book of Horror were not only is
about in human skin, but you somehow get the chill
bumps goose goose bumps. You get a copy of goose
bumps skin with goose bumps. There you go. Uh, So
(36:13):
there's there's lots of examples that. Robert's got a couple
more here. But the Mudern Museum, which is in Philadelphia
at the College of Physicians, that's that's a place where
you can see a couple of these. We've mentioned this
on the show before. There's even a librarian there who
specializes specifically in human skin books. Um. There's other places
like California, Berkeley's Bankrupt Library, Brown University, in the National
(36:35):
Library of Australia. These are all libraries where you can
go and ask to see these books. The one at
Brown is the one that I heard was the last
known to be made. It was apparently bound in eight
although you know from what we're hearing maybe there is
also some later on up until World War Two. Um.
The binder though in eighteen ninety three, didn't have enough
(36:56):
human skin for the book. So what they did was
they took the skin and they kind of haved it.
The front half uses the outer layer of skin in
the back and the spine or made from the inner
layer of skin. All right, so I have I have
a list of some other books here. I am probably
not going to mention them all, so let me just
scan through and see which ones bear mentioned. Uh. There
(37:17):
was an English physician bibliophile in classes named Anthony aske
You in the eighteenth century. He apparently had had one
anatomy textbook bound in human flesh. Another English doctor, John Hunter,
from more or less the same time period, he had
a copy of the book abalong ubad halt Krockenheiden bound
(37:38):
in quote healthy cured human skin. At least it was healthy. Yeah,
you do want to make sure it's healthy. You don't
want like jaundice books. Yeah. And you know there are
other accounts of eighteenth century doctors just hand enough other
weird things to each other made from human skin. Uh.
French botanist naturalist val Monte dim Boumare reported that famed
a Parisian surgeon in Sue. I could not find any
(38:02):
additional information on one m Sue but apparently gave it
a pair of slippers made from human skin to a
museum and apparently given the museum also a belt of
human skin with nipples on it. Now. In an American example,
Joseph Leady have we touched on Leadia no um? He
(38:22):
had a copy of his own elementary treatise on Human
Anatomy eighteen sixty one, bound in flesh. The inscription inside
reads quote the leather with which this book is bound
is human skin from a soldier who died during the
Great Southern Rebellion. And by the way, in eighty six,
Leady became the first person ever to use a microscope
(38:42):
to solve a murder mystery. There you go, you know
he had all that experience handling human skin, although it
seems like the book was published after his microscope discovery. Uh.
Here's another curious incident that came up. This was a
young German law student named Ernst Kaufman, and he only
lusted for fame. And he made a collection of two
(39:03):
hundred wood cut cuts titled Hunt Boom It Mana And
he had it bound in his own skin after death,
and it wound up in the library of Dr Matthew
Would of Philadelphia. See, so I could see doing that.
I could see like when I passed away saying like
I don't know, uh, put a copy of Stephen King's
(39:25):
The Shining in Myself, you know, and get and leave
it to Robert Lamb like something like that. And it
doesn't That doesn't really bother me that much. But taking
somebody else's skin, especially when they're your patient. Yeah, that's
where it gets it. If it's purely consensual, I thought,
I'm fine with it, but it's you get into a
(39:47):
weird area with all these other physicians we've been talking about.
I can't help but just picturing pinhead from the hell
raisor movies, you know what sites you'll see. Now here's
another site. This one comes This was the French apparently
ordered the execution of a notorious criminal that was known
only as campey c A m p I. And he
(40:08):
was to be flayed after death, and the tan Hi
be used to quote bind a volume containing the complete
story of his life and exploits. That sounds a bit
nuts to me, And there's apparently no evidence that this
was actually carried out in a literal sense, But I
guess it is kind of poetic, right, because what are
any of us but a book bounded humanity or we'd
like to think of our This is the thing. So
(40:30):
where we're getting is like a lot of these are
French examples, their French physicians, and they love like the
meta nature of binding books about anatomy or biology or
human virginity in human skin. Now here's another example that
came from that Thompson source that I mentioned earlier. Uh,
(40:51):
A book binder reportedly prepared several human skin volumes for
a doctor V This is another French doctor, including a
volume that had apples on the front. And the apparently
also was a big fan of tattooed flesh, and he
obtained human skin tattooed with two nights stooking it out,
and he ordered a copy of The Three Musketeers bound
(41:13):
in it. Wow, I can't imagine how bad that must look, because, like,
you know, I've had friends who've who've gotten kind of
crumby tattoos in their twenties and then like now we're
in our forties going into fifties, and it's like that's
getting a little blurry, you know. But then like you
take it off and you cure it and tan it
(41:33):
and go through that whole process. I can't imagine that
you'd really be able to see the Knights fighting each
other all that. Well. Yeah, Like I remember seeing old
navy tattoos on some some old guys shoulders and church
when I was a kid, and you basically couldn't know
what they were anymore. Right, Yeah, they're just like kind
of blobs. So before we take another break and come
(41:53):
back and discuss the science, I want to say that
I feel like the more we looked at these examples,
the more I felt like I was answering my own
question about the lack of skin bound books and say
the works of HP Lovecraft, because maybe even though there's
one mention of tanned human hide in a book, like
maybe he and other writers of his time, we're a
(42:15):
little more aware of the fact that books found in
human flesh were not that we're usually not that fancy,
We're not that occult and dark and secret of a thing.
It was more this kind of boring, normalized thing that
kind of rich uppity physicians did. Yeah. So you know,
from my knowledge of horror literature, the ones that immediately
(42:38):
pop to mind and using the term literature strong here,
but the the ec comics and the kind of creepy
and eerie comics from the fifties bip into the seventies.
This was a common theme, I think, because they're playing
off the burke and hair thing of like you know,
oh no, like like there's a classic story that I think,
um Jack Davis Drew, I think there was like a
(43:00):
butcher who was like procuring dead bodies for a client
or something like that, or maybe it was like you know,
there were there were multiple stories that were like this.
Like one of them was like a people who owned
a funeral home and business was low and so like.
So there were all these like weird stories of just
procuring dead bodies for various menacing means, and oftentimes they
(43:22):
end up as books or something like that at the
end of these stories. But you're right, like that was
like a good I don't know, thirty years after Lovecraft
was working. Yeah, so maybe you just had to they
had to be a certain amount of time that passed
before this could become cool again. Right, It kind of
like was outside of the popular consciousness. Yeah, that's my
that's just a theory. Anyway, Well, let's take another break,
(43:44):
and when we get back, let's get into the science
of how you actually figure out if your book is
bound in human flesh. Alright, we're back. So, as we
discussed human hide, is that different different from other hides?
And ultimately we have a book that is allegedly bound
(44:05):
in human flesh? How can you tell? Yeah, well, the
way to identify human leather. Okay, first of all, it
obviously has different poor sizes and shapes than a pig
or a calf skin. Right. Apparently, it also has a
waxy smell that is sometimes used to identify fraudulent books.
But when human skin is tanned, it's DNA traces are
(44:25):
mostly destroyed, so it's much harder to identify a specific donor.
Usually historians have to turn to inscriptions and historical records. Right.
We've mentioned this with several of the examples, like on
the inside of the book it says, YadA, YadA, YadA,
this book was bound and so and so skin um.
But when you really need to know, you get a
(44:47):
scientist and you turn to a method called peptide mass fingerprinting,
and this identifies proteins to create a PMF that's a
fingerprint basically that allows analysts to identify the source of
the flesh. Now at Harvard they did this with the
destinies of the Soul book we were talking about, and
(45:07):
they confirmed, yes, it is human skin. Uh, though there
is a chance that it could be a closely related
primate like a gibbon or a great ape, but it's
definitely not cheap cattle or goats. So we'll get into
this in a minute. But but they can narrow it
down to sort of like your the family. You know,
even if the book were just bound in the hide
(45:29):
of of a gibbon, that's still impressive. I think it
would be creepy. Yeah. Um, they're sure in this one
case because they followed up the PMF with a liquid
chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Uh. And they did this to
determine the order of the amino acids that are in
(45:50):
the sample. These are basically the building blocks of each
of the peptides that are different in each species. Harvard
has done similar testings on books they thought were human skin,
but instead they turned out to be sheep skin. And
here's an example. Uh, there was this book that it's
referred to the coloring as being quote subdued yellow with
(46:12):
a sporadic brown and black splotches like an old banana.
And they thought it was human skin. It was supposedly
the skin of a man named Jonas Wright who was
flayed alive by an African tribe who then turned him
into a book. Uh. And it's a total fake when
that sounds saying, because when you think African tribe, you
don't think, oh, well, modern European book buying. Yeah, exactly right.
(46:35):
Like the minute I read about that, I was like,
of all of these examples here, that's the one that
just sounds like kind of just like this racist stereotype example. Right. Um,
And there's a lot of fakes out there too, including
one that was purported to be made from the skin
of Christmas Addicts, Addicts being an African American man who
was one of the first victims, if not the first,
(46:57):
at the Boston massacre leading to the Revolutionary War. Um.
This is where we enter into the anthropedermic book project.
So this is the team of scientists that I've been
referring to. Their goal is to create a census of
the alleged anthropedermic books in the world. And they say
their method is easy, that it's inexpensive. In fact, it
(47:18):
costs less than a hundred dollars per book, and it's authoritative,
and they started in their current count as of September
is they have seen examined forty seven alleged books, thirty
are in the process of being tested. Eighteen have been
confirmed as human skin, and twelve have been confirmed as
(47:38):
not human skin. So the majority, though have have turned
out to actually be turned out. Yeah. Uh. They also
they use this PMF method that I refer to, and
they explain it further. They say, the technique uses enzymatic
digestion of extracted collagen to cut the protein at specific
(47:58):
amino acids ights that form a mixture of peptides. And
basically they placed the sample in an enzyme bath that
digests the collagen in it down into peptides. Now, each
mammal has a unique amino acid sequence in our collagen,
so the mixture of peptides is like a unique fingerprint. Uh.
(48:19):
They also use matrix assisted laser disorption ionization time of
flight mass spectrometry. The acronym for that is Maldy good
Old much much easier to say, uh, And they use
this to analyze these peptide mixtures for specific marker icons.
(48:39):
Now that this is what they say. They say they
prefer the PMF method to DNA analysis because it quickly
differentiates the hominid family from things like sheep, goats, pigs, cow,
and deer. The usual kinds of skins that are used
for book binding. It is very unlikely that a book
from the nineteenth century would be bound in the skin
(49:00):
of another member of the Grade eight family, So they
feel pretty comfortable if it's an older rare book, saying, well,
if it's part of the hominid family, it's more likely
that it's a human being than it is a given. Yeah.
Because so, as we discussed part of the whole reason
for books being bound in human fleshes, you had human
flesh just sort of sitting around, Yeah, and people made
use of it. How difficult was it to procure a
(49:22):
gibbon back then, you know? Uh? So they also prefer
collagen testing to DNA because it lasts longer, especially if
the skin is preserved through tanning or mummification. Uh. Collagen
is really tough and it can be analyzed long after death.
So the thing that they point out here about DNA,
this is something that Joe and I talked about in
(49:44):
our Forensics episode, is that DNA can lead to false positives.
For instance, like when a person is handling the book,
maybe their DNA gets accidentally magnified. Right. Uh. They do, however,
recognize that PMF cannot tell whether the skin came from,
for instance, a man or a woman, where the person
might have come from, and who their relatives were, while
(50:05):
DNA can another method they discount is something called follical
pattern recognition. And the premise here is that human skin
patterns are arranged in different shapes and other animals. Uh.
So people would, you know, compare these patterns and say, well,
that's human skin, that sheep skin. Uh. They say, though
this is pretty subjective, especially if the pattern gets changed
(50:27):
by processing, dying, and stretching of the skin. And they say,
they only need tiny, tiny samples, something visible under thirty
times magnification is sufficient material for analysis, and this is
comparably the size of a needle prick. Uh. So what
they do is, uh, they began the a BP team uh.
(50:50):
And they have been confirming books as not being human
skin or being human skin. Um. One of the examples
is the Biblioteca Politica that was that June Niata College
in Pennsylvania, and it was thought to be anthropodermic and
it fascinated students, especially during Halloween, so they would come
into the library they'd want to all look at it.
(51:10):
After the PMF test, though, it turns out it was
sheep skin. So not every institution actually wants to go
public with these results. Some of them are hiring these
folks to come in and do the tests, but they're
not releasing the results because the mystery of the human
skin bound books. You know, that's attracting visitors. Yeah, I mean,
especially given how ultimately unimpressive some of these books are
(51:32):
on their own. If you take away the the the
idea that they're bound and even flesh, what are you
left with? Yeah, just some like old court papers. Now
fast forward to to today, and generally you're not going
to find much in the way of human bound books more. However,
one interesting example that I came across was a proposal
(51:52):
for a skin book made from synthetic flesh for aspiring
tattoo artists. This was in the apparently made the rounds
and the news back in Tattoo Art magazine commissioned Brazilian
ad agency to help bring this idea to fruition, and
so the idea would be that they would have it
would have it would be a little like a mole
skinned book, except it's human skin book with pages of
(52:15):
human skin to you know, test out your tattooing skills. Okay,
So like the inside of the book is like your
instructions on how to be a tattoo artist. And then
when you're practicing with your tattoo machine. You're doing it
on the cover of your book, kind of like when
we used to, like as kids, wrap our books up
in grocery bags and then we draw all over them.
(52:36):
Uh No, actually this one would have been like all
the pages inside would have been blank pages of skin.
I think that, but that was the proposal. Wow, okay, okay,
now that seems this is this is like a lot
of these these things that have come out, like the
Alexander McQueen thing, where someone saying, hey, we could do this,
let's do it. If it actually gets it's made, that's
another thing. But it does. It's the the uh, the
(53:00):
advancing technology being able to you know, clone human skin,
grow human tissue away from a human body. It does
bring the possibility of human bound books back. Like I
can kind of imagine a future where you'll have special
hard bound editions of certain books that will come out
and you'll be able to get it in. I mean,
(53:23):
take for instance, Stephen King you mentioned earlier. So one
day Steve will not be with us anymore. It's not conceived,
it's not inconceivable that there will be a sample of
his tissue somewhere and there will and there will be, uh,
there'll be someone will be given permission to clone that
tissue and you could buy copies, you could buy the
Stephen King Library and and each book would be found
(53:45):
in Steve's skin. Those super I don't know if you've
seen these, those like super fancy cemetery dance editions of
his booth that are like, you know, really nicely bound.
But yeah, like even further than that, well, I mean
like given research that we have done for other episodes
on this show, we're not conceivably that far away from
being able to three D print human skin. So yeah,
(54:07):
I mean, as as long as you're not. Again, like
my my line is like, if you're taking it from
somebody without asking them, that's not cool. I guess I'm
okay with it. If you're making human skin based on
somebody else's DNA, but there they you know, they don't
have a say in it. That I think I'm okay
with that, And of course I'm okay you want to
(54:28):
take my skin. I gotta think about this now. It's
really got to change my whole will what book is
going to be bound in my skin? And who gets it?
That's a tough decision. Like you want your own book
bound in your human skin? Or is that? Is that
being too self a little pretentious? So you gotta pick
something that you just really admire, and you admire enough
to actually have part of your body wrapped around it. Well,
(54:52):
we'd certainly love to hear from any of our listeners
out there who have thoughts on that. What book would
you would you submit your flesh? Four? Would you want
to be utilized in the binding for we can look
here from What part of your body do you think
would be best for it? I guess I guess that
the Mary Lynch doctor maybe had it right. The thigh
(55:14):
seems like a good place to start, but uh, you know,
I don't know, I've never really been in that situation.
You know. Earlier, I know, we talked about tattoos not
aging well and questioned how how these books would work
if it were possible to preserve it, And I'm not
sure how that really works. How the tiny the tanning
process affects tattoo quality. I could see tattooed flesh making
(55:38):
for a nice book cover run Oh yeah, yeah, like
if you took like a full sleeve, that could be
really cool looking. So if you want to share your
pictures of your human skin bound books, or maybe your
tattoos that you would like to use to cover some
books with in the future. There are lots of places
you can get in touch with us at and you
can send us those. We're all over social media. We're
(55:59):
on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, and we
are on Instagram, and you can always visit us at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's right, that's
the mother ship. That's where you find all the podcast episodes,
including the various playing episodes we mentioned earlier. I'll try
and link to all of those in the landing page
for this episode, as well as from the outside sources
we not mentioned. And as always, if you want to
(56:21):
just write us the old fashioned way, we're at blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how
stuff works dot com. Remember no, no,
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and my name is Christian Sayer. Hey, Robert,
would you read a book if you knew that it
was bound in human skin? Oh, that's a that's a
(00:25):
tough one, because it was bound in my skin. Well,
I feel I feel even more weird about it because
I'd like to be I'd like to take care of
my books and be respectful to my physical books as
much as possible. And uh, if it's a really nice book,
there's a lot of pressure, right. You don't want to
bend that fancy cover. You don't want to just leave
it sitting around. And if it's bound in human flesh,
(00:48):
I feel like I've got to go above and beyond.
I've got a lot of special Yeah, I've got to
get a special jacket for it. I've got to perhaps
put moisturizer on it. I don't know all the rules
because I don't have any books bound in human flesh.
One of the things things that I heard and read
during our research for the episode that we were about
to conduct was that apparently human skin is like any
other leather bound book, as long as you just keep
(01:11):
it at like a moderate temperature should be okay. And
for the most part, the libraries and archives that have them,
you know, they have them. Obviously, they're in special collections.
They're kept away there behind glass, or they're you know,
in boxes somewhere, but there they don't need like any
special I don't know. It's not like like you need
human skin spray to wipe down your book with, right, Yeah,
(01:33):
Because it basically comes down to the reality that that
human hide is just another hide. Granted it's one that
has a lot of a lot of personal um value
attached to it and a lot of a lot of
taboo energy associated with with its use, but it's ultimately
not that different from any other animal skin. Yeah, really,
(01:53):
it isn't um And so we're gonna talk about this
today because there's a weird history behind it. But also
there's a new science that's popped up in the last
two years to confirm whether or not a book is
actually bound in human skin. And you may be sitting
out there listening to this and saying, surely that's not
really a thing. Uh, And you know, we've all heard
(02:16):
of these kinds of books and horror movies or something, right, like,
the one that I immediately think of is the Necronomicon
Ex mort Us from Evil Dead, uh, infamously bound in
human skin. But what others, Well, well, this one's interesting
because of course you know it's very much bound in
human skin in the Evil Dead movies. Yeah, but the
(02:37):
neverrica necronomicon is that originally appears in HP Lovecraft's writings.
I don't believe was ever mentioned as being bound in
human flesh. Oh okay, yeah, yeah. In fact, there's only
one reference I could find. Maybe some some other Lovecraft
readers out there can can correct us, But the only
story I found where he makes a reference to a
(03:00):
bound in human skin is his story The Hound that includes, uh,
this description of kind of an occult stash statues and paintings.
There were all the fiendish subjects, and some executed by St.
John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound and tanned human
skin held certain unknown and unnamable drawings, which was rumored
(03:23):
Goya had perpetrated but dared not at knowledge. So there's
one reference to a book bound in human skin. But
for the most part, like it's something that turns up
in a horror fiction. Sometimes in Stephen King's Eyes that
the Eyes of the Dragon, the flag character reads from
a book of this's bound in human skin. It's implied
(03:44):
that this might be the Necronomicon. But for the most part,
I couldn't run across any specific examples of like old
school horror fiction and weird fiction that had much in
the way of of human flesh bound books. I couldn't either.
The only one that popped into my head, and I
could confirm it by quickly looking up this movie was
The Ninth Gate. Do you remember that Roman Polanski movie
(04:05):
with Johnny Depp and he had he was like traveling
around the world to get I think there were three
copies that he had to confirm if they were real
or not. That were these books that you basically used
to summon a portal to Hell. Yes, you're speaking of
the Book of the Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows.
The book that this was based on was The Club
Duma by AUTHORO Perez ROBERTA. Yeah, yeah, I read this
(04:29):
many years ago, so I've forgotten most of it, but
I remember it being pretty fun. I looked back in
it a little bit for this episode, and I it
appears that in the book at least it was bound
in um seventeen century Venetian binding, and there were three
copies of this sixteen sixty six demonology text sixteen sixty six.
It was a good year for the hmonomy, but three
(04:53):
copies survived the Inquisition, and in the story um two
of those copies contain elaborate forgeries. So you only have
one volume that will actually work the others. If you
try and follow the various demonic summoning consulting spells, you're
gonna do it wrong and you might die. Yeah. That's
an interesting little movie. I've heard the books are much
(05:14):
better too. But the movie it's not a great movie,
but I weirdly come back to it every couple of years. No,
it's it's uh. I have to say that the book
might be bound in human flesh in the movie, because
I know that the movie kind of played up some
more of the demonic and horror themes. Yeah, whereas the
(05:34):
book kind of kept a distance from some of that stuff.
But it's a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah, it's got
that scene with the woman in the wheelchair. That's what
I always think of when I think of that. I
don't remember that at all. She's she's dying and she's
just kind of like flailing around in like one of
those powered wheelchairs. It's it's pretty brutal. Yeah. Anyways, So
(05:54):
speaking of brutal, how about some books bound in human
skin or just skinning humans? Yeah, because that's really where
we have to to come back to. But before we
get into the utilization of human flesh, uh, in book binding,
we have to go back even further. I have to
go back far before we were binding books at all
and just talk about, well, what's the history of just
pulling flesh off of people? Do you want to share
(06:16):
a fun fact with our audience that we learn when
we're putting the notes together for this. Yeah, So if
if you if you see this phase of stuff to
blow your mind as as phase three, which I guess
I'm I'm now thinking of it as uh, phase four
is when we're all robots. But this is the This
is technically the fifth episode of the podcast to discuss
(06:37):
Human Flame, Jeff, the Killer Episode, the Incomplete Unfinished episode,
the mind Let episode, the Human Remains episode, and Cobra
Effect and the Horrors of scalp hunting and don't forget
mind flares, they don't flay skin, but that there is
a at least the word flame. Yeah, so it's it's
(06:59):
a five point five. Yeah. So the just the flaying
of humans as barbaric as it is has been around
for quite some time. UM. I was looking at one
particular text, uh, when we're when we're researching this, and
this is an older publication, but it was from Lawrence S.
Thompson writing for the U. S. Department of Agriculture in
(07:23):
he has this whole uh paper, this whole chapter tanned
human skin, and he says that the mere tanning of
human hides obviously goes back much further than book binding.
For instance, Herodotus wrote about the Scythians and their cultivation
of this art. If you will. In Saxon, Britain, certain
(07:44):
offenders could pay hide geld for their crimes. So I
guess that would be essentially paying so you would still
be alive, but you would give parts of your skin,
or it would be like a I'm going to be executed,
but in payment you will be able to take miss skin.
I'm not I'm not certain on this because on one hand,
I'm I'm wondering if it's if it means that you
(08:05):
would pay a little actual guild so your hide would
not be taken, or if it's kind of um, you know,
you're basically paying for your your crimes with a piece
of your skin. Um. Also, he also mentions that Danes
who committed sacrilege in churches could be flayed and their
skins nailed the church doors, which seems seems a little
(08:26):
sacrilegious to put a human skin on a church door.
It seems like you're you're punishing the crime with another crime.
But that's just my modern sensibilities, I guess. Well, and
that's what we're gonna learn in this episode two is
that a lot of this comes down to what is
taboo nowadays versus what was two hundred years ago, three
hundred years ago, and further back. Really we're talking about
(08:48):
the medieval and Renaissance period when this was at its height,
but the last I think the last recorded one was
in the late nineteenth century. Yeah. And then one of
the things too about human flaying in general is that, yes,
it undoubtedly has happened, and it has been the practice
of different cultures at different times. But on the other hand,
(09:08):
it is hard work it's it's grizzly work, and sometimes
just the idea of it taking place picks up steam
and becomes part of the myth, whereas it might not
and it might not have actually happened. Like, for instance,
there's a legend of jan Zika, the Hussite military commander,
and apparently the legend is that his dying wish was
(09:28):
that drums may be made from his his skin so
that he could continue to lead his troops in battle
in some fashion. And you know who, who knows if
there's any truth to that at all, but the story, uh,
certainly resonated with everyone. And that's kind of part of
what this this new scientific practice is all about, because
there's so many stories and legends about, oh, this book
(09:51):
is bound in human skin, and you know, you can't
really tell it first glance, and we're gonna talk about why.
But turns out, like a lot of these old archives,
when you actually test their books, they don't always turn
up as actually being made of human skin. Sometimes they're
just sheep skin or lamb skin or cow or deer
or something. Right. I mean, in some of these accounts,
even books that that definitely are made of human skin, Uh,
(10:14):
they have been described as looking like they're made from
pig skins. Yeah, yeah, So much of it is just
your expectation of and you're you're what you're you're thinking about?
Is the story regarding this think it definitely has to
do with the tanning process too. As we go through
some of the examples throughout this episode too, Like some
of them you look at them and you go, oh,
that's a part of a human being, and others you
have no idea. So then you know, I'm assuming, like myself,
(10:38):
many of you out there might not actually be familiar
with the process of tanning, and tanning human hides is
essentially similar to how you would tan other hides. But
let's go through it real quick. So there's many that
are bound. Many types of books in particular that are
bound in human skin can include prayer books, astronomy treatises,
and court cases, and then deaffinitely anatomy text, which stricts
(11:02):
me as being very meta, very wink wink, nudge nudge.
But the official name for this type of book binding
is called anthropodermic biblio peggy or page. It was mostly
done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was
primarily by physicians to bind their anatomy texts. Uh. And
in these cases it was usually human skin that was
(11:25):
claimed from medical cadavers or criminals that were sentenced to death,
but sometimes their skin was also used to bind the
record of their trials as a form of punishment after death.
And we'll explain why and some of the examples. Uh.
It was supposedly this is a rumor I think popular
during the French Revolution, uh, where there was quote unquote
(11:46):
a fresh supply of bodies available. Yeah. I was actually
reading about the French Revolution tie in and apparently royalist
propaganda from the time claimed that the revolutionary leather goods
were generated by a human leather tannery. There's one place
in particular, I think in uh mutant any U d
o n. And I'm not that great the fringe either,
(12:08):
but but yeah, that was the propaganda going around all
these revolutionaries, all of their leather comes from human flesh. Okay, well,
you know we're gonna have an example coming up that
is of a market asad book. So maybe and that
was right around that time ish, so maybe that's possible. Um,
it turns out to that sometimes these books were bound
(12:30):
in human skin. Out of affection for the author. Now
there's at least one interesting account. Yeah, this is not
necessarily that they've taken the author's skin and bound his
book in it, although I think that might have happened too.
But but more often that you send your skin to
your favorite author after you die, you have you've paid
(12:51):
ahead of time for the shipping. Uh, maybe you stamps
dot com to send your human skin, you know, I
could understand that. I mean we I feel like a
lot of us are reading ongoing series and the idea
of dying before the author finishes that series can be
a little troubling, right, So I could see like sending
a piece of your your skin to say, George R.
(13:13):
Martin exactly, Scott Baker or somebody and saying, look, I'm
not going to survive to read your book, but if
you could, maybe if I could be there in some fashion, Yeah, exactly,
And that is that's how it went down. But yeah,
I mean, essentially, what you do is you cure an
animal skin when you're tanning. You do it by soaking
it in salt and then in water, and then you
(13:33):
treat it with various chemicals that soften it up and
keep it from decomposing in some cases and in some
of the human cases we're gonna talk about urine is used. Okay, Yeah, because,
like we said, the human skin is just another animal hide.
And you know, there are accounts of tanners using human
skin and book bindings, and in these cases you can
compare many of the cuts of human hide to pig hide.
(13:56):
The pores, hair, and in some cases the nipples can
be telling, but can also just be easy to look
at it and think it's just any other type of leather.
Not something I ever really thought about before with just
you know, leather working in general, is like what what
do they do about the animal nipples? You know, like
if I have a belt or I have shoes or whatever,
(14:17):
like do they just cut around the nipples? Well, what
do they do with the nipple part? It's interesting that
this les Yeah, they do. They have, They have quite
a number of them. It seems like with with actual
leather work, there's gonna be a tendency to remove all
aspects of the creature. You don't want to be reminded
that this came from an animal. But in many of
(14:38):
these cases of human hide use, there is a deliberate
effort to make it resemble a person in some way,
shape or form. There's even one where there's an impression
of the person's face. Yeah. Really, but that's like so Necronomicon. Yeah,
that's a new show on the ABC Family. So Necronomicon.
(15:01):
Now Laurence Lawrence S. Thompson and that that the writing
that I mentioned. He writes about several non book binding
uses of human skin from some of the from this
time period, ranging from slippers to an alleged coin purse
made from a human scrotum. It was employed by a
burlesque dancer. Honestly, I'm not sure how much I'd buy
(15:23):
that because symbolism aside, who really wants to lug around
a scrotum? You know? Yeah, it seems like a lot
of work, But it also seems like maybe it's like
some kind of symbolic victory over like if she's a
burlesque dancer, maybe it was like it belonged to somebody
who had wronged her. Yeah, I mean, the story of
it makes sense, but at the end of the day,
you're left with what sounds like a pretty ugly coin purse.
(15:46):
I guess with any of these things, if it's if
it's made in a way to look like it was
it was manufactured from a human body. The appeal is
going to wear off with most collectors pretty fast. That's
the kind of that's my two cents on it. Yeah, yeah,
you're not that wrong. So why don't we take a
quick break and when we come back, we're gonna give
you just a just a pile of examples to show
(16:09):
you how real this is. Okay, we're back. So let's
talk about some notable books that were bound in human
flesh and why were they all? Right, uh, yeah, before
we get into and I just want to drive home
again the time frame we're looking at. So, according to
(16:29):
the late Age of print, everyday book culture from consumerism
to control by Ted Streyfus, the binding of books and
human flesh persisted as a practice from basically the late
eighteenth century to and he argues the conclusion of the
Second World War. Now he's like, he's largely alluding to
the allegations that the Nazi doctors used flesh in in
(16:53):
the construction of lamp shades. Oh right, Yeah, this came
up a lot in the literature and was kind of
most of the writers who were focusing on the book
binding where like the lamp shade thing is is unconfirmed. Yeah,
and it's been more importantly, it's it's not a book like,
just to be very uh specific, they're referring to a
lampshade is not a book binding. So um So I
(17:15):
don't know if that timeline exact timeline can can really
be trusted, but you could basically say that that that
was probably the last time someone could have really gotten
away with it in the in the the the sort
of learned academic sense of it. A buffalo bill too. Yeah. Yeah.
And and also, as we'll discuss at the very end,
(17:35):
there are examples of modern uh flesh usage and various
art projects, the construction of of tennis shoes made from
human flesh, that sort of thing. If you follow the
kind of social media feeds we do, if you probably
have seen examples. I feel like I shared this on
stuff to blow your mind at one point. But there
was this artist who made these shoes with human teeth. Yeah,
(17:56):
that's the one I'm thinking. Yeah, yeah, those were really bizarre.
But also, you know, for us and for most of
our listeners, kind of cool to look at. Yeah, there
was a there was a recent art project where someone
who's was planning to take the skin samples from the
late fashion designer Alexander McQueen talked about into a jacket.
Yeah so, but but even that, that's you're talking about cloning,
(18:19):
you take it's a modern spin on on on this, uh,
this older method of book binding, of utilizing human flesh
and some sort of uh, you know, quote unquote practical sense.
So before I get into this, I want to note
that one of my sources was from a blog by
a woman named Dr Lindsay fitz Harris, and she's a
(18:40):
medical historian who specializes in the history of early surgery. Uh.
And it's a fascinating blog. So if you like this
is the kind of thing you're interested in, and you
like what you're hearing, and you might want to go
check it out because she's got just lots of entries
on things like this. But let's start with father Henry Garnett.
Apparently he was a conspirator as part of the sixteen
(19:03):
oh five gunpowder plot. Many of you will know this
as now being memorialized as Guy Fox Day. He conspired
to blow up the houses of Parliament in England, and
his uh sixteen oh six record of his offenses is
bound in his skin. And this is the title of
the book, A true and perfect relation of the whole
(19:25):
proceedings against the late most barbarous traders Garnet, a Jesuit
and his confederates. Now this is you know, if you're
one of our British listeners, you're probably well familiar with us.
But for our other listeners, this is why Great Britain
celebrates the fifth of November as Guy Fox Day. It's
mostly popularized over here from Alan Moore and David Lloyd's
(19:48):
v for Vendetta, which was made into a movie a
couple of years ago. So you occasionally see folks wearing
Guy Fox masks here, but it's really like the for
Vendetta masks for them. H Garnet himself actually wasn't active
in the plot to do this, but he knew of it,
and so he was hung, and then he was drawn
and quartered before his skin was removed. Now, one copy
(20:10):
of this book, this is the one I was talking about,
has been found with an impression of his face on
the front cover, and it went for eleven thousand dollars
at an auction in two thousand and seven. That doesn't
seem like that much to me. I don't know. I
guess I'm not really in on the pricings of rare books,
especially like human skin books, but eleven thousands seems kind
(20:32):
of low, like it's less than a car. Yeah, I
don't know. I guess you it's going to be awkward
to read that book because if you're on the train
with it, people are going to be staring at the face.
You're like, do you hold the nose when you've got
the front cover opening your lap? If it's a big book, Yeah,
do I want to even put it in my lap
if it's got somebody's face on it? I don't know.
And you're really you're just reading like sixteen hundreds legal records.
(20:56):
That's ultimately a boring book. But the next one that
we should talk about, and this is the fan one
is I like to call it the French Countess. Uh,
this is the fan. So she was a big fan
of occultist astronomer Camille Flammarion, and she sent a strip
of skin from her shoulders to him after she died
(21:19):
from tuberculosis, and then he used it to bind a
copy of a book on the description of the planets
in our solar system. Yeah, it was. This was this
was fascinating. Again. This comes back to this idea that hey,
I'm not gonna be around for your next book. I
love your work, and he bind your next book in
my skin. Uh, And he did that, and it was
(21:40):
it apparently was even this is the kind of thing
that happened today. It would be in all the headlines,
right and even at the time people were asking questions.
You're like, WHOA, tell me more about this? And so
Flammarion ended up responding to one of these questions. And
I have the letter that he wrote in response. He
he says, my dear doctor, the story has been somewhat
expanded it. I don't know the name of the person
(22:02):
whose dorsal skin was delivered to me by a physician
to use for binding. It was a matter of carrying
out a pious vow. Some newspapers, especially in America, published
the portrait, the name, and even the photograph of the
chateau where the quote unquote countess lived. All of that
is pure invention. The binding was successfully executed by Ingle,
(22:23):
and from then on the skin was inalterable. I remember
I had to carry this relic to a tanner in
the rue de la rene Blanche, and three months were
necessary for the job. Such an idea is assuredly bizarre. However,
in point of fact, the fragment of a beautiful body
is all that survives of it today, and it can
endure for centuries in a perfect state of respectful preservation.
(22:46):
The desire of the unknown woman was to have my
last book published at the time of her death, bound
in this skin, the Octavo edition of The Terrorist Doucier
published by did he enjoys this, honor your reader and
admire Flammarion. So I didn't do a deep dive into Flammirion.
He might be somebody who want to come back to
(23:07):
it a later day, because he reminds me of John
d um But apparently, like when he was around, he
was known as sort of I don't crank isn't really
the right term, but he like he had like a
lot of predictions based on like his his observations of astronomy,
and I think one of them was something like Hayley's
comment was gonna crash into earth and kill everybody or
(23:28):
something like that. Like he had like a lot of
like kind of apocalyptic you know, scare tactics. Yeah. I
don't know a lot about him either, but I do
know this, Um, he believed that it was perfectly reasonable
to use a woman's skin to bind a book. I'm
a woman whose name he didn't know. Yeah, I mean,
he makes kind of an interesting argument. He's saying, look,
(23:49):
beautiful woman, she's dead, she would just be forgotten. Now
she gets to live on as part of this forever,
as long as the planets. So I don't know, all right,
but it is interesting to hear the the the author's
take on this a little bit. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Um,
I can't believe you're able to dig that up. That's
pretty cool. Um. So here's the Marquis assad book that
(24:12):
I was mentioning earlier. If you're familiar with his work,
it's copies of his work Justine. Uh So. Medical interns
apparently supplied the breasts of deceased female patients to an
English binder of erotica in the nineteenth century to bind
copies of Justine. Uh And this is so obviously more
(24:32):
than one copy of Justine. And in one example, there
is an intact nipple on the cover. And the research
article that I read about this had a picture of it. Um,
but that seems weirdly fitting for the Marquis Assad. Yeah.
I was reading about this as well, apparently, um, and
you you were able to uncover actual photographs of this. Yeah,
(24:54):
because the way I saw it described was that the
Goncour brothers, who were French writers at the time, that
they kind of gossiped that interns in the this place
the Calmer where we're dismissed because of the delivered skin
from breasts the female patients to the binder of obscene
books in uh Faull book. Saint Germain uh and then
(25:16):
publisher Isidore or Lazoo claimed to have seen the volume
that you've described here. Well, you know, this could be
one of those examples where this is legend. I mean,
of course, like so market Assad is infamous, of course,
Like if you really want to like like mark up
the value on your Marquis Assad book, you say, oh, yeah,
(25:36):
this just happens to be made from the skin of
of a mental patients breasts. Oh no, they weren't mental patients.
They were just deceased patients. The mental patients come later. Um,
but you know what I'm saying, like that this would
be one that would be great to test if they
could ever, uh, you know, get it over to this
team of scientists that we'll talk about later. Indeed, now
(25:56):
at this point, a number of our American listeners are
probably thinking, Man, Europeans of this time period, we're just
we're just kind of awful. Americans would never engage in
this sort of bizarre a book collecting grotesque ery. Not true.
We've got James Allen, who went by the alias George Walton,
(26:17):
and he was from my home state, Massachusetts, or at
least that's where he died. Uh. He was a nineteenth
century criminal who willingly donated his skin after he tried
to rob a man on the mass Turnpike. His victim
fended him off, so Alan, when he was captured, requested
that his skin be used to bind a book of
(26:38):
his crimes that was given to his victim as a
quote token of his esteem. Huh. And this is on
display at the Boston Athenaeum Library. Another book from his
skin went to his doctor apparently so he had he
had enough left over, He just said, gives him here
a little bit here. I hope everyone is really like,
the big message that I got from the research was
(27:01):
just how normalized. Yeah, this was granted not among everybody,
but in certain circles. It was the kind of thing
where you could arrest and be like, oh, yeah, I'll
want my skin to bind this book in that book.
Like today, no one would be you would just you
would just be considered a complete wacko. Uh. But I
mean maybe you were considered a whack o at the time.
We were considered a you know, unacceptable kind of whack
(27:22):
in eccentric Uh. You know, I don't know. I kind
of wonder like if any of our pathologist friends are
out there listening it, if you are used to dealing
with the dead and you're handling them and you're opening
them up and you're doing autopsies, you know, I wonder
how much further down the road it really is to
(27:45):
take the skin off. I mean, the tanning process seems
to be the hardest part about that. Although I'm you know,
I've never actually removed somebody's skin, but you know what
I'm saying, Like, like I think like once you've already
gone down the path of being, uh, someone who conducts
autopsies on a regular basis, and you're just sort of
used to the dead human body being an object and
(28:07):
not a person. Maybe it's not that far removed to
say like, well, we might as well get some use
out of this. Yeah, I mean yeah, I think that's
a perfectly valid point here, because you know, you're either
going to be a tanner who is who is who's
engaging with the hides all the time, or you were
a doctor who is dissecting criminals and and uh and
(28:30):
you know deceased patients. Yeah, that's what it seems like.
Another and so this is a famous example but also
a good example to give us an idea of why
these were conducted the way they were. And it is
Burke's skin pocketbook. Uh. This is the notorious Scottish murderer
who committed his crimes between eighteen seven and eighteen eight
(28:54):
with his associate Hair, So Burke and Hair. I think
that's a movie, right, Yeah, there was a sign Simon
Peg and yeah, Simon Peg and Gollum. I haven't seen it.
That's Gollum's real name. I feel bad, Candy Circundy Circus. Yeah. Uh,
those guys played these characters. I wonder if in that
movie version they show the book at the end. But uh,
(29:15):
so these two killed sixteen people and the reason why
I was to sell their bodies to an anatomist. Uh.
Burke was hung and then dissected, and his skin now
binds a book at the Surgeon's Hall Museum in Edinburgh. Uh.
This book is described as being dark brown, almost black,
and honestly it's not really a book. It's really kind
(29:37):
of a wallet for personal notes and money. There's no
paper between it. Uh. And why why was this done?
We're starting to see a pattern here right, Well, apparently
there was a law called England's Murder Act of seventeen
fifty one, and this stipulated that not only would a
murderer be executed, but they couldn't be buried. So they
were like, what are we gonna do with all these bodies?
(29:59):
So they what they would do is they would usually
dissect them, sometimes in public, you know, as kind of
a lecture hall series or something like that. Sometimes they
hung the bodies and chains, but some like Burke, were
made into book covers. Uh. So there you go. Another
one of these, it's kind of similar, is at the
Bristol Record Office. It's a there's a book there that
(30:22):
accounts the first man to be hung at Bristol gaul
I think that's how you pronounce it. I guess over
here we'd call it gallows. Uh. It's a guy named
John Horwood. Now, the story goes Horwood was eighteen years
old and he was infatuated with a woman named Eliza Balsam,
and he threw a stone at her while she was
fetching water, and then he quote beat her skull to pieces.
(30:44):
Uh ditto, same as Burke. He was dissected during a
public lecture, and then his skin bound the papers about
the case. So that's another place where apparently you can
you can see some of these now here. This next
example is one of the most disturbing from and it's
right here in the US of A. And you can,
in fact, uh see these books at the Mutter Museum. Uh,
(31:08):
the Mary Lynch books, as they're called. So Mary Lynch
was a twenty eight year old woman who died from
tuberculosis and parasitic infection tricken gnosis in eight she'd been
in this hospital care facility for six months, and the
physician who did her autopsy needed to remind his trio
(31:28):
of anatomical texts on human reproduction. That's how the story
is first portrayed. But then I read multiple articles about
this and got the full story. So basically what he
did was he's conducting her autopsy. He takes a section
of skin from her thigh, then he hands it in
the hospital basement. But he didn't at first repurpose it
(31:48):
for these book covers. Mary apparently only weighed sixty pounds
at the time of her death. It was apparently a
gruesome affair. He tanned her skin using a bed pan,
and they think it might have been filled with human
urine instead of the usual uh, you know, salt and
chemicals that were used. Uh. And they say this would
(32:10):
have taken two weeks to a month. This guy, who
was only twenty three years old at the time. But wait,
he holds onto her skin until eighteen eighty seven, So
nineteen years later, Uh, he decides, I'm gonna buy in
these anatomy books up uh and the three volumes are
now in the Mudern Museum. Some speculate that the treatment
(32:34):
like this shows an example of how doctors at the
time saw themselves as being social superiors to their poorer patients. Uh.
And he also published her autopsy in the eighteen sixty
nine issue of the American Journal of Medical sciences, and
apparently it included this very gruesome graphic that depicted the
(32:57):
number of parasites that were in her body during the autopsy.
So this just sounds this sounds very morbid. Yeah, there
is this sense. You do get a strong sense of
physicians here who have a godlike complex about their their
powers over the human body and and certainly to your
point there their social superiority to the poorer patients. Yeah. Yeah,
(33:22):
this is the kind of thing. It's funny because like
that's a stereotype I think of when I think of
like the nineteenth century medical man, you know. Um, but
that's mainly from entertainment, you know, I'm thinking of like,
I don't know, Penny Dreadful, right, like Dr Frankenstein, I'm
Penny Dreadful, or characters and stuff like Deadwood or something
like that. Right, Like, like doctors just were a little
(33:44):
quirky back then, at least that's what our fiction tells us.
But then we like this, Yeah, well one of the
things is you are entertainment. Of course we want our
doctors quirky. I'm gonna watch, you know, sixteen hours about
this doctor. He'd bet he or he'd better be quirky.
You know that. It's one of the reasons I love shows,
like like the nick that was going to mention after
factory and that very quirky doctor. I wouldn't want it
(34:07):
any other way. But then you look in the in
the histories and you do find these real eccentric spirits
in the medical profession. And I mean that goes back.
I mean, and that goes all the way back through
ancient times and to the age of vivisection, etcetera well,
and leads to us having characters nowadays like Hannibal Lecter.
You know, like that, it all kind of makes sense
(34:27):
when when you trace the history of it. Another example
you'll see a lot of Here is a book called
Destinies of the Soul. Oh, it is a good one.
This is a book by writer Are Scene, who say,
I believe it's how you pronounce it, and it was
given to his friend Dr Ludovic Bouland in the eighteen eighties.
(34:48):
Now Bouland is thought to have bound the book himself
in the skin of an unclaimed female mental patient who
died of natural causes. He apparently also found a sixteenth
century next on virginity and human skin. Although we don't
know where that human skin came from. So this guy's
like setting off my my creepy meter. But these books
(35:10):
are interesting, especially well really both of them, because these
are the first ones that really feel like they could
belong in a Lovecraftian library. Um. The one book in particular,
Destinies of the Soul eight, focuses on the afterlife and
theories of the human soul, and the book is inscribed
with this. This book is bound in human skin parchment,
(35:32):
on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance.
A book about the human soul deserved to have a
human covering. I had kept this piece of human skin
taken from the back of a woman. Yeah, Bouland just
really of all the people in here, he's the one
who really just kind of like squipped me out, gave
(35:53):
me what do you call it, um, chill bumps. Yeah,
Now that would be interesting to have a book. But
I guess the Book of Horror were not only is
about in human skin, but you somehow get the chill
bumps goose goose bumps. You get a copy of goose
bumps skin with goose bumps. There you go. Uh, So
(36:13):
there's there's lots of examples that. Robert's got a couple
more here. But the Mudern Museum, which is in Philadelphia
at the College of Physicians, that's that's a place where
you can see a couple of these. We've mentioned this
on the show before. There's even a librarian there who
specializes specifically in human skin books. Um. There's other places
like California, Berkeley's Bankrupt Library, Brown University, in the National
(36:35):
Library of Australia. These are all libraries where you can
go and ask to see these books. The one at
Brown is the one that I heard was the last
known to be made. It was apparently bound in eight
although you know from what we're hearing maybe there is
also some later on up until World War Two. Um.
The binder though in eighteen ninety three, didn't have enough
(36:56):
human skin for the book. So what they did was
they took the skin and they kind of haved it.
The front half uses the outer layer of skin in
the back and the spine or made from the inner
layer of skin. All right, so I have I have
a list of some other books here. I am probably
not going to mention them all, so let me just
scan through and see which ones bear mentioned. Uh. There
(37:17):
was an English physician bibliophile in classes named Anthony aske
You in the eighteenth century. He apparently had had one
anatomy textbook bound in human flesh. Another English doctor, John Hunter,
from more or less the same time period, he had
a copy of the book abalong ubad halt Krockenheiden bound
(37:38):
in quote healthy cured human skin. At least it was healthy. Yeah,
you do want to make sure it's healthy. You don't
want like jaundice books. Yeah. And you know there are
other accounts of eighteenth century doctors just hand enough other
weird things to each other made from human skin. Uh.
French botanist naturalist val Monte dim Boumare reported that famed
a Parisian surgeon in Sue. I could not find any
(38:02):
additional information on one m Sue but apparently gave it
a pair of slippers made from human skin to a
museum and apparently given the museum also a belt of
human skin with nipples on it. Now. In an American example,
Joseph Leady have we touched on Leadia no um? He
(38:22):
had a copy of his own elementary treatise on Human
Anatomy eighteen sixty one, bound in flesh. The inscription inside
reads quote the leather with which this book is bound
is human skin from a soldier who died during the
Great Southern Rebellion. And by the way, in eighty six,
Leady became the first person ever to use a microscope
(38:42):
to solve a murder mystery. There you go, you know
he had all that experience handling human skin, although it
seems like the book was published after his microscope discovery. Uh.
Here's another curious incident that came up. This was a
young German law student named Ernst Kaufman, and he only
lusted for fame. And he made a collection of two
(39:03):
hundred wood cut cuts titled Hunt Boom It Mana And
he had it bound in his own skin after death,
and it wound up in the library of Dr Matthew
Would of Philadelphia. See, so I could see doing that.
I could see like when I passed away saying like
I don't know, uh, put a copy of Stephen King's
(39:25):
The Shining in Myself, you know, and get and leave
it to Robert Lamb like something like that. And it
doesn't That doesn't really bother me that much. But taking
somebody else's skin, especially when they're your patient. Yeah, that's
where it gets it. If it's purely consensual, I thought,
I'm fine with it, but it's you get into a
(39:47):
weird area with all these other physicians we've been talking about.
I can't help but just picturing pinhead from the hell
raisor movies, you know what sites you'll see. Now here's
another site. This one comes This was the French apparently
ordered the execution of a notorious criminal that was known
only as campey c A m p I. And he
(40:08):
was to be flayed after death, and the tan Hi
be used to quote bind a volume containing the complete
story of his life and exploits. That sounds a bit
nuts to me, And there's apparently no evidence that this
was actually carried out in a literal sense, But I
guess it is kind of poetic, right, because what are
any of us but a book bounded humanity or we'd
like to think of our This is the thing. So
(40:30):
where we're getting is like a lot of these are
French examples, their French physicians, and they love like the
meta nature of binding books about anatomy or biology or
human virginity in human skin. Now here's another example that
came from that Thompson source that I mentioned earlier. Uh,
(40:51):
A book binder reportedly prepared several human skin volumes for
a doctor V This is another French doctor, including a
volume that had apples on the front. And the apparently
also was a big fan of tattooed flesh, and he
obtained human skin tattooed with two nights stooking it out,
and he ordered a copy of The Three Musketeers bound
(41:13):
in it. Wow, I can't imagine how bad that must look, because, like,
you know, I've had friends who've who've gotten kind of
crumby tattoos in their twenties and then like now we're
in our forties going into fifties, and it's like that's
getting a little blurry, you know. But then like you
take it off and you cure it and tan it
(41:33):
and go through that whole process. I can't imagine that
you'd really be able to see the Knights fighting each
other all that. Well. Yeah, Like I remember seeing old
navy tattoos on some some old guys shoulders and church
when I was a kid, and you basically couldn't know
what they were anymore. Right, Yeah, they're just like kind
of blobs. So before we take another break and come
(41:53):
back and discuss the science, I want to say that
I feel like the more we looked at these examples,
the more I felt like I was answering my own
question about the lack of skin bound books and say
the works of HP Lovecraft, because maybe even though there's
one mention of tanned human hide in a book, like
maybe he and other writers of his time, we're a
(42:15):
little more aware of the fact that books found in
human flesh were not that we're usually not that fancy,
We're not that occult and dark and secret of a thing.
It was more this kind of boring, normalized thing that
kind of rich uppity physicians did. Yeah. So you know,
from my knowledge of horror literature, the ones that immediately
(42:38):
pop to mind and using the term literature strong here,
but the the ec comics and the kind of creepy
and eerie comics from the fifties bip into the seventies.
This was a common theme, I think, because they're playing
off the burke and hair thing of like you know,
oh no, like like there's a classic story that I think,
um Jack Davis Drew, I think there was like a
(43:00):
butcher who was like procuring dead bodies for a client
or something like that, or maybe it was like you know,
there were there were multiple stories that were like this.
Like one of them was like a people who owned
a funeral home and business was low and so like.
So there were all these like weird stories of just
procuring dead bodies for various menacing means, and oftentimes they
(43:22):
end up as books or something like that at the
end of these stories. But you're right, like that was
like a good I don't know, thirty years after Lovecraft
was working. Yeah, so maybe you just had to they
had to be a certain amount of time that passed
before this could become cool again. Right, It kind of
like was outside of the popular consciousness. Yeah, that's my
that's just a theory. Anyway, Well, let's take another break,
(43:44):
and when we get back, let's get into the science
of how you actually figure out if your book is
bound in human flesh. Alright, we're back. So, as we
discussed human hide, is that different different from other hides?
And ultimately we have a book that is allegedly bound
(44:05):
in human flesh? How can you tell? Yeah, well, the
way to identify human leather. Okay, first of all, it
obviously has different poor sizes and shapes than a pig
or a calf skin. Right. Apparently, it also has a
waxy smell that is sometimes used to identify fraudulent books.
But when human skin is tanned, it's DNA traces are
(44:25):
mostly destroyed, so it's much harder to identify a specific donor.
Usually historians have to turn to inscriptions and historical records. Right.
We've mentioned this with several of the examples, like on
the inside of the book it says, YadA, YadA, YadA,
this book was bound and so and so skin um.
But when you really need to know, you get a
(44:47):
scientist and you turn to a method called peptide mass fingerprinting,
and this identifies proteins to create a PMF that's a
fingerprint basically that allows analysts to identify the source of
the flesh. Now at Harvard they did this with the
destinies of the Soul book we were talking about, and
(45:07):
they confirmed, yes, it is human skin. Uh, though there
is a chance that it could be a closely related
primate like a gibbon or a great ape, but it's
definitely not cheap cattle or goats. So we'll get into
this in a minute. But but they can narrow it
down to sort of like your the family. You know,
even if the book were just bound in the hide
(45:29):
of of a gibbon, that's still impressive. I think it
would be creepy. Yeah. Um, they're sure in this one
case because they followed up the PMF with a liquid
chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Uh. And they did this to
determine the order of the amino acids that are in
(45:50):
the sample. These are basically the building blocks of each
of the peptides that are different in each species. Harvard
has done similar testings on books they thought were human skin,
but instead they turned out to be sheep skin. And
here's an example. Uh, there was this book that it's
referred to the coloring as being quote subdued yellow with
(46:12):
a sporadic brown and black splotches like an old banana.
And they thought it was human skin. It was supposedly
the skin of a man named Jonas Wright who was
flayed alive by an African tribe who then turned him
into a book. Uh. And it's a total fake when
that sounds saying, because when you think African tribe, you
don't think, oh, well, modern European book buying. Yeah, exactly right.
(46:35):
Like the minute I read about that, I was like,
of all of these examples here, that's the one that
just sounds like kind of just like this racist stereotype example. Right. Um,
And there's a lot of fakes out there too, including
one that was purported to be made from the skin
of Christmas Addicts, Addicts being an African American man who
was one of the first victims, if not the first,
(46:57):
at the Boston massacre leading to the Revolutionary War. Um.
This is where we enter into the anthropedermic book project.
So this is the team of scientists that I've been
referring to. Their goal is to create a census of
the alleged anthropedermic books in the world. And they say
their method is easy, that it's inexpensive. In fact, it
(47:18):
costs less than a hundred dollars per book, and it's authoritative,
and they started in their current count as of September
is they have seen examined forty seven alleged books, thirty
are in the process of being tested. Eighteen have been
confirmed as human skin, and twelve have been confirmed as
(47:38):
not human skin. So the majority, though have have turned
out to actually be turned out. Yeah. Uh. They also
they use this PMF method that I refer to, and
they explain it further. They say, the technique uses enzymatic
digestion of extracted collagen to cut the protein at specific
(47:58):
amino acids ights that form a mixture of peptides. And
basically they placed the sample in an enzyme bath that
digests the collagen in it down into peptides. Now, each
mammal has a unique amino acid sequence in our collagen,
so the mixture of peptides is like a unique fingerprint. Uh.
(48:19):
They also use matrix assisted laser disorption ionization time of
flight mass spectrometry. The acronym for that is Maldy good
Old much much easier to say, uh, And they use
this to analyze these peptide mixtures for specific marker icons.
(48:39):
Now that this is what they say. They say they
prefer the PMF method to DNA analysis because it quickly
differentiates the hominid family from things like sheep, goats, pigs, cow,
and deer. The usual kinds of skins that are used
for book binding. It is very unlikely that a book
from the nineteenth century would be bound in the skin
(49:00):
of another member of the Grade eight family, So they
feel pretty comfortable if it's an older rare book, saying, well,
if it's part of the hominid family, it's more likely
that it's a human being than it is a given. Yeah.
Because so, as we discussed part of the whole reason
for books being bound in human fleshes, you had human
flesh just sort of sitting around, Yeah, and people made
use of it. How difficult was it to procure a
(49:22):
gibbon back then, you know? Uh? So they also prefer
collagen testing to DNA because it lasts longer, especially if
the skin is preserved through tanning or mummification. Uh. Collagen
is really tough and it can be analyzed long after death.
So the thing that they point out here about DNA,
this is something that Joe and I talked about in
(49:44):
our Forensics episode, is that DNA can lead to false positives.
For instance, like when a person is handling the book,
maybe their DNA gets accidentally magnified. Right. Uh. They do, however,
recognize that PMF cannot tell whether the skin came from,
for instance, a man or a woman, where the person
might have come from, and who their relatives were, while
(50:05):
DNA can another method they discount is something called follical
pattern recognition. And the premise here is that human skin
patterns are arranged in different shapes and other animals. Uh.
So people would, you know, compare these patterns and say, well,
that's human skin, that sheep skin. Uh. They say, though
this is pretty subjective, especially if the pattern gets changed
(50:27):
by processing, dying, and stretching of the skin. And they say,
they only need tiny, tiny samples, something visible under thirty
times magnification is sufficient material for analysis, and this is
comparably the size of a needle prick. Uh. So what
they do is, uh, they began the a BP team uh.
(50:50):
And they have been confirming books as not being human
skin or being human skin. Um. One of the examples
is the Biblioteca Politica that was that June Niata College
in Pennsylvania, and it was thought to be anthropodermic and
it fascinated students, especially during Halloween, so they would come
into the library they'd want to all look at it.
(51:10):
After the PMF test, though, it turns out it was
sheep skin. So not every institution actually wants to go
public with these results. Some of them are hiring these
folks to come in and do the tests, but they're
not releasing the results because the mystery of the human
skin bound books. You know, that's attracting visitors. Yeah, I mean,
especially given how ultimately unimpressive some of these books are
(51:32):
on their own. If you take away the the the
idea that they're bound and even flesh, what are you
left with? Yeah, just some like old court papers. Now
fast forward to to today, and generally you're not going
to find much in the way of human bound books more. However,
one interesting example that I came across was a proposal
(51:52):
for a skin book made from synthetic flesh for aspiring
tattoo artists. This was in the apparently made the rounds
and the news back in Tattoo Art magazine commissioned Brazilian
ad agency to help bring this idea to fruition, and
so the idea would be that they would have it
would have it would be a little like a mole
skinned book, except it's human skin book with pages of
(52:15):
human skin to you know, test out your tattooing skills. Okay,
So like the inside of the book is like your
instructions on how to be a tattoo artist. And then
when you're practicing with your tattoo machine. You're doing it
on the cover of your book, kind of like when
we used to, like as kids, wrap our books up
in grocery bags and then we draw all over them.
(52:36):
Uh No, actually this one would have been like all
the pages inside would have been blank pages of skin.
I think that, but that was the proposal. Wow, okay, okay,
now that seems this is this is like a lot
of these these things that have come out, like the
Alexander McQueen thing, where someone saying, hey, we could do this,
let's do it. If it actually gets it's made, that's
another thing. But it does. It's the the uh, the
(53:00):
advancing technology being able to you know, clone human skin,
grow human tissue away from a human body. It does
bring the possibility of human bound books back. Like I
can kind of imagine a future where you'll have special
hard bound editions of certain books that will come out
and you'll be able to get it in. I mean,
(53:23):
take for instance, Stephen King you mentioned earlier. So one
day Steve will not be with us anymore. It's not conceived,
it's not inconceivable that there will be a sample of
his tissue somewhere and there will and there will be, uh,
there'll be someone will be given permission to clone that
tissue and you could buy copies, you could buy the
Stephen King Library and and each book would be found
(53:45):
in Steve's skin. Those super I don't know if you've
seen these, those like super fancy cemetery dance editions of
his booth that are like, you know, really nicely bound.
But yeah, like even further than that, well, I mean
like given research that we have done for other episodes
on this show, we're not conceivably that far away from
being able to three D print human skin. So yeah,
(54:07):
I mean, as as long as you're not. Again, like
my my line is like, if you're taking it from
somebody without asking them, that's not cool. I guess I'm
okay with it. If you're making human skin based on
somebody else's DNA, but there they you know, they don't
have a say in it. That I think I'm okay
with that, And of course I'm okay you want to
(54:28):
take my skin. I gotta think about this now. It's
really got to change my whole will what book is
going to be bound in my skin? And who gets it?
That's a tough decision. Like you want your own book
bound in your human skin? Or is that? Is that
being too self a little pretentious? So you gotta pick
something that you just really admire, and you admire enough
to actually have part of your body wrapped around it. Well,
(54:52):
we'd certainly love to hear from any of our listeners
out there who have thoughts on that. What book would
you would you submit your flesh? Four? Would you want
to be utilized in the binding for we can look
here from What part of your body do you think
would be best for it? I guess I guess that
the Mary Lynch doctor maybe had it right. The thigh
(55:14):
seems like a good place to start, but uh, you know,
I don't know, I've never really been in that situation.
You know. Earlier, I know, we talked about tattoos not
aging well and questioned how how these books would work
if it were possible to preserve it, And I'm not
sure how that really works. How the tiny the tanning
process affects tattoo quality. I could see tattooed flesh making
(55:38):
for a nice book cover run Oh yeah, yeah, like
if you took like a full sleeve, that could be
really cool looking. So if you want to share your
pictures of your human skin bound books, or maybe your
tattoos that you would like to use to cover some
books with in the future. There are lots of places
you can get in touch with us at and you
can send us those. We're all over social media. We're
(55:59):
on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, and we
are on Instagram, and you can always visit us at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's right, that's
the mother ship. That's where you find all the podcast episodes,
including the various playing episodes we mentioned earlier. I'll try
and link to all of those in the landing page
for this episode, as well as from the outside sources
we not mentioned. And as always, if you want to
(56:21):
just write us the old fashioned way, we're at blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
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