The Disturbing History of Books Made From People

There are certain things one expects to find in an old library.

Dust. Crumbling leather. Forgotten inscriptions. The occasional pressed flower sleeping between pages where someone left it a century ago.

One does not generally expect to find a person.

And yet, scattered among the collections of libraries and museums are books whose bindings were made from human skin.

The practice has a suitably dreadful name: anthropodermic bibliopegy.

For generations, stories about such books occupied that wonderfully murky territory between history and Gothic legend. Libraries whispered about volumes supposedly covered in the skin of murderers. Collectors passed along stories of physicians who had preserved pieces of their patients. Old catalog cards and handwritten notes solemnly declared that a particular binding was human.

Sometimes the stories were nonsense.

Sometimes the binding was sheep.

And sometimes science looked at the old book and delivered the considerably less comforting answer:

Yes.

It really is human.

A Library Legend Becomes Something Else

Human-skin books are extraordinarily rare, but they are real.

Researchers with the Anthropodermic Book Project have attempted to sort genuine examples from centuries of rumor. As of its April 2024 count, the project had identified 51 books alleged to have human bindings. Thirty-two had been tested or were undergoing testing.

Eighteen were confirmed as human.

Fourteen were not.

That distinction matters because the folklore surrounding these books has always been considerably larger than the practice itself. An ominous note tucked inside a volume might be enough to give it a reputation that survived for generations.

Modern researchers have something those earlier librarians did not: peptide mass fingerprinting, a technique capable of distinguishing human collagen from that of animals commonly used in bookbinding.

It has produced some wonderfully anticlimactic results.

The sinister human hide occasionally turns out to be perfectly ordinary sheepskin.

But then there is Des destinées de l’âme.

The Book About the Soul

French writer Arsène Houssaye published Des destinées de l’âme—Destinies of the Soul—in the nineteenth century. It was a meditation on the soul and what might become of it after death.

One copy eventually belonged to Dr. Ludovic Bouland, a French physician and bibliophile.

Bouland decided the book required a particularly meaningful binding.

Human skin.

According to the documentation that accompanied the volume, the skin came from the body of an unidentified woman who had died in a French psychiatric hospital. There is no evidence that she consented to this peculiar afterlife.

Bouland even explained his reasoning in a handwritten note preserved with the book: a work concerning the human soul, he believed, deserved a human covering.

There are moments when history manages to surpass Gothic fiction simply by refusing to recognize when it has gone too far.

The volume eventually reached Harvard, where it entered the university's collections in 1934.

For decades, the claim rested largely on the book's provenance and Bouland's own handwritten account. In 2014, scientific testing finally put the matter to rest. 

Then scientists tested it.

In 2014, peptide mass fingerprinting established that the binding was indeed human.

The legend was true.

Why Would Anyone Do This?

There was never one single reason.

Some examples were associated with executed criminals, whose bodies could be dissected and whose skin was sometimes subsequently used for bindings. Many confirmed examples are connected to nineteenth-century physicians and medical collections, where access to unclaimed bodies created opportunities that would now raise profound ethical objections.

There were also collectors.

For a certain kind of bibliophile, rarity has always exerted a dangerous gravitational pull. A book that nobody else could possess had obvious appeal.

A book made from something nobody else would dare possess was rarer still.

This is where the history becomes more uncomfortable than the simple idea of a "creepy book."

The binding itself may make us recoil.

But the deeper story concerns power.

Who had control over a human body after death?

Who was considered important enough to deserve a grave?

Who was considered unimportant enough to become an object?

In several cases, the person whose remains survived has been remembered far less clearly than the doctor, collector or institution that acquired them.

When the Dead Become Collectibles

That question eventually caught up with Harvard's copy of Des destinées de l’âme.

For years the book was treated as an extraordinary curiosity. Harvard has since acknowledged that its own handling of the volume sometimes contributed to the sensationalism surrounding it. Library lore even held that student workers were once sent to retrieve the book without being warned what its binding actually was.

But attitudes toward human remains in museum and university collections have changed.

In March 2024, Harvard announced that the human-skin binding had been removed from the book.

The university concluded that the remains no longer belonged in its library collection. It began further research into the identity and history of the anonymous woman and consideration of an appropriate, respectful disposition for her remains.

The book itself remains.

The woman is no longer its cover.

There is something quietly important in that distinction.

The Problem With a Very Good Ghost Story

Perhaps that is also why anthropodermic books fascinate us so much.

They look like objects that ought to belong to fiction.

Place one in a story and we immediately know what happens next. Someone opens it despite repeated warnings. There is probably a candle nearby. Latin will be spoken badly. Nothing good will come of it.

Real anthropodermic books are more unsettling because they require none of that.

They do not need curses.

They do not need demons.

They do not need to whisper from locked cabinets after midnight.

Their horror lies in the fact that ordinary, educated, respectable human beings once looked at another person's body and saw material.

Someone removed the skin.

Someone prepared it.

Someone bound the book.

Someone placed it on a shelf.

And then, for decades or even centuries, other people opened it and turned the pages.