Until recently, the book’s authenticity had been called into question, but the library’s breakthrough discovery officially put the nail in the coffin of this anthropodermic bibliopegy mystery.
#Harvard university library books bound in human skin skin
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. By looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance.
Bouland then bound the book using skin from a deceased female mental patient, whose body was never claimed. According to a blog post on the Houghton Library’s website, Bill Lane, director of the Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, said the peptide mass fingerprints from the book’s binding ultimately matched a reference made about the cover’s origins that’s inscribed on the inside of the book.Īs the story goes, in the 1800s Houssaye gave the book, which is about the human soul and what happens after death, to a man named Dr.
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