Bound by Human Skin, Not Ethics

June 6th, 2025

Anthropodermic bibliopegy:
Definition: human skin bound book. Mostly made by nineteenth-century doctors.
*Trigger Warning: Dead people, medical malpractice*

I had first read of books bound in human skin in Madman’s Library by Edward Brooke-Hitching (a must-read). I was, of course, grossed out, but still very curious. I don’t even do good around cremated remains so I probably would puke if I were to encounter one of these. Knowing (and hoping) that I was probably never going to experience one, I ceased thinking about it until Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom was recommended to me by the rare book librarian supervising my internship. I immediately checked it out from the public library, and renewed it three times before I ever actually opened it.

Fig.1 - Dark Archives by Megan Rosebloom

This topic is at the perfect cross-roads between my career and my little sisters. She is finishing her degree in forensic science and has touched about 100% more dead people than I have. Luckily, she spares me most of these stories but shares them with my mother who has an even weaker stomach than I do. But, I have gathered from her experiences starting in this morbid field that she keeps a pretty thick wall between her and the reality presented in front of her. I know I wouldn’t really want to process fingerprinting hands that have decayed off of a corpse’s body. But could someone in a morbid profession really build a wall thick enough to sever your empathy enough to defile a corpse to bind a book to increase its monetary and social status value?

Fig.2 - Des destinées de l’ame (The Destinies of the Soul) by Arsène Houssaye. An anthropodermic book from Harvard's Houghton Library.

A point that Rosenbloom focuses on throughout this book is: "Foucault pointed out the inherent tension between hospitals’ servicing the sick and educating the doctors” (p.45).

This excerpt reminded me of a paper I wrote in my first semester of library school about the inherent tension between libraries facilitating access and preserving the collection, “While both access and preservation are essential duties of an archive, conflicts between the two are no stranger to many archivists. Rubin and Rubin (2020) state that “It is a natural temptation for an archivist to do everything possible to preserve the human record, but archives are of little value if they cannot be consulted relatively easily” (p. 578). It is very human to want a straightforward black-and-white scenario, one with an easy solution that can be adapted in every instance that this situation occurs”(Paper I wrote).

Rosenbloom deals with both tensions throughout this book, balancing research value, ethics, access, and preservation. “If it weren’t for the endurance of these objects, carefully attended to by library and museum staff, we wouldn’t be able to study them with today’s technologies and interrogate them through our updated lenses. After a while, people could question whether these objects ever existed, eventually dismissing them as too incredible to be anything but legend” (p.65). This quote isn’t directly about the anthropodermic books, but about bodies dug up in Philadelphia from the 18th century. When I started reading the accounts of Joseph Leidy of the early days of the Mütter Museum, my twelve-year-old-inner-nerd came beaming out of me.

Fig.3 - Book bound out of murderer William Burke. In the collection of Surgeons' Hall Museum.

When I was in my tweens, I lived just outside of Philly. One of my most cherished memories was sitting somewhere around Independence Hall or perhaps the ruins of Benjamin Franklin’s home when a park ranger walked up to me and asked me if I had ever heard of the yellow plague. Little did she know, I had just finished a book, 1792, about this very topic for school. I immediately felt so smart to know about this historical event, the park ranger bent down to my level and told me of the bodies of yellow plague victims that have been dug up from beneath the Philly cobblestone roads, hundreds of years later. This was a very formative moment for me, this was when history felt like something that actually had happened, and not just stories told by teachers or parents. I wrote about this in my college essays and I tend to tell it in job interviews. The same bodies being dug from beneath the revolutionary streets brought Rosenbloom to reconcile with the power of physical historical objects and the impact that preservation of objects has on our current and future understanding of our world and our history.

Rosenbloom was able to sum up my philosophy on museum and library collection in one short sentence: “I see them less as objects and more as vessels for stories” (p.17-18). And unfortunately, sometimes the stories are super gross. Sometimes the most important story isn’t held by the object, but in the object’s provenance. Who made this book? Who wanted this book? Who is this book?