Harvard Confirms Book Is Bound in Human Skin.

 

“Des destinées de l’ame” by Arsène Houssaye.

scientists at Harvard have confirmed that a 19th-century French treatise in the university’s libraries is almost surely bound in human skin, thus ending months of uncertainty and setting off a torrent of online Hannibal Lecter (get it?) jokes.

The book, Arsène Houssaye’s “Des destinées de l’ame” (On the Destiny of the Soul), came under renewed attention in April, after researchers concluded that another book at Harvard previously thought to be an example of anthropodermic bibliopegy — as the practice of binding books in human flesh is known — was in fact bound in sheepskin.

The Houssaye book, deposited at Harvard’s Houghton Library in 1934, contains a manuscript note claiming that the book was bound in skin taken from the back of a woman, since “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.” Researchers confirmed the claim using several techniques, including peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF), which identifies proteins.

“The PMF from ‘Des destinées de l’ame’ matched the human reference, and clearly eliminated other common parchment sources, such as sheep, cattle and goat,” Bill Lane, the director of the Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, and Daniel Kirby, of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, told the Houghton Library Blog.

That test could not rule out the possibility that the book was bound in the skin of a great ape or a gibbon. But researchers said that additional scientific analysis, along with information about the book’s provenance, made that extremely unlikely.

The practice of binding books in human skin, which dates at least to the 16th century, was once somewhat common, according to the Houghton blog. Criminal confessions were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted, and individuals might request to be memorialized for family or lovers in the form of a book covered in a piece of themselves.

If that practice seems grisly today, the more ordinary practice of binding books in animal skins has been problematic in some places, according to Leah Price, an English professor and book historian at Harvard who was not involved in the analysis.

“In 19th-century India, some Christian missionaries made the mistake of trying to distribute bibles bound in calfskin or containing pig byproducts,” Ms. Price said by email. “It’s not just about the binding: until the 20th century most glues used in books as well as the ‘sizing’ used to coat paper were made by boiling down pieces of animal carcass.”