What would you say if someone wishing to express their love gave you a piece of themselves? Literally! For example, in the form of romantic sonnets elegantly framed in ... human skin. Sounds like a horror story? Not necessarily. Our ancestors believed that wasting nice pieces of their skin was not always a good idea.
Stories of using human skin to make books date back to the 13th century. At that time, two Bibles and a decree were to be created, the content of which was written on this macabre material. These copies formerly enriched the collection of the Sorbonne library and are now owned by the French National Library. Were human tissues really used to create them? It is difficult to say because the authorities of the institutions have not yet investigated the real origin of the cards of these volumes.
Anyway, the history of France seems to be quite closely related to the history of anthrophermic bookbinding (as it is officially called human skin binding). The outbreak and brutality of the French Revolution were to be the perfect moment for the development of this art. There is said to have been a tannery in Meudon that specialized in tanning human skin, which was used not only to bind books, but also to make clothes, e.g. vests or breeches.
The truth of this place raises doubts among historians and scientists, but stories of various types of "humanized" that were allegedly in the collections of bibliophiles from the Seine also circulated after World War II.
“Few of us have grand tour , bypassed the Carnavalet museum and did not see a copy of the French constitution of 1793 [bound in human skin - ed. aut.] ”- wrote the American Lawrence S. Thompson in a post-war article on anthropermic bookbinding. Thompson was certainly not one of them - he even described the color of the bezel ("slightly green").
As with any controversial topic, this one is full of myths and legends, and establishing the truth is not made easier by the fact that the tanning process damages DNA, thus making it difficult to confirm its credibility suspicious copies. This does not mean, however, that books bound in human skin should be put between fairy tales.
Atonement for the crimes
In the 19th century in Great Britain, it was not considered a sufficient punishment for someone to be hanged for a crime they had committed. That is why many bodies of convicts ended up in medical schools and hospitals, where they were used for scientific purposes.
Public postmortem examinations and organ harvesting allowed to educate crowds of young doctors. However, it was not the only form of "redemption" by a condemned man. It happened that the skin was peeled off the body of a deceased and then used to ... frame a trial on his crime.
The text was created, among others based on the book "Library of madness. The Greatest Publishing Curiosities. ”By Edward Brooke-Hitching. It was published by the Rebis Publishing House
This happened, inter alia, 18-year-old John Horwood, executed for causing the death of a girl he was unhappily in love with. With a patch of his skin, “the files (…) of his case were later bound. The book's cover is decorated with a skull and crossbones and the words Cutis Vera Johannis Horwood ". The man's skeleton was used for almost two centuries to study anatomy - until his distant relative finally asked for him and arranged for a burial.
Of course, there were more similar cases and they were not always related to the "commemoration of the criminal's accomplishments". Items such as dictionaries or even poetry (e.g. a collection of Milton's works) were also bound with their leather. It was not always about the posthumous punishment of the criminal.
James Allen, also known by law as George Walton, was a rebellious robber who roamed the Massachusetts area of the first half of the nineteenth century. When his "activity" came to an end, he requested that his skin be bound with two copies of his memoirs, which can still be seen in the Boston Athenaeum library.
A gift of love
History also knows people who saw giving someone a part of their skin as a romantic gesture. Such an "honor" was received by, among others French astronomer Camille Flammarion. He received as a gift a flap of skin from the back of a young countess (he never knew her name), who was secretly in love with him . The woman, dying of tuberculosis, wished the scientist to skin her latest work after her death.
"Such an idea is absolutely bizarre," explained the astronomer in a letter to the historian and physician Dr. Augustin Cabanes. "But a fragment of this beautiful body is all that remains of it today, and it can survive the next centuries in a state of respectful conservation." . The astronomer fulfilled the wish of an anonymous admirer and wrapped in her skin Terres du ciel which appeared in 1877.
John Horwood Leather Book
On the other hand, a poet, who had a serious accident while riding a horse and lost a leg, not wanting the limb to be completely wasted, asked for it to be skinned. He ordered his sonnets to be framed with the material obtained in this way - he later gave them as a gift to his beloved. Another woman decided to commemorate her deceased husband in a similar way:
At the beginning of the 20th century, at the Elbert Hubbard factory in New York, where the young bookbinder Dard Hunter worked, a future widow asked to bind her husband's letters. She brought her own material - leather from the back of a dead man. When Hunter found out some time later that the woman had remarried, he wondered if her husband, looking at the book shelf, was considering what he would look like as Volume II . »Hopefully it was a limited edition« - he concluded this anecdote in his memoirs »My life with paper«.
Today, for most of us, this form of expressing our feelings seems macabre. However, it should be noted that these feelings largely shaped the events of World War II, when the Nazis used human remains from concentration camps to produce everyday objects (e.g. soap, wallets or photo albums). What used to be a form of punishment, caution, or whim became a symbol of the idea that the goal was to eliminate an entire nation.
Nevertheless, anthropogenic bookbinding, as frightening as it seems to us today, in the past in many cases served both as a commemoration and as a distinction of a work from others - often with the consent of the donors of this largest human organ.