Books Bound in Human Skin, and Their New England Connections

The other day, I went down an Internet rabbit hole reading about books bound in human skin. You know, just your average light summer reading. I usually associate human-skin-covered books with horror movies and novels, but there are some real ones out there in the world. 

Interestingly, quite a few of these books are connected to New England, even though there aren't that many of them out there in the world. Megan Rosenbloom, a UCLA librarian, is an expert on "anthropodermic bibliopegy," which is Latin for "binding books in human skin." In a New York Times interview last year, she estimated there are only 51 books on Earth allegedly bound in human skin. She and some colleagues have verified that 18 of them are authentic. Fourteen are fake and actually bound in animal leather. The remaining 19 books still need to be tested. (New York Times, April 19, 2024, "Books Bound in Human Skin: An Ethical Quandary at the Library")

A book once believed to be bound in human skin. From the Wellcome Collection. 

A few of the 51 books are connected to people from New England. One such book is The Highwayman, a confessional autobiography by convicted criminal James Allen. The full title of the book is quite long: Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison. I love those old-fashioned, don't you?

Allen died from tuberculosis in a Charlestown, Massachusetts prison in 1837. He was only 27, but had lived a life full of criminal exploits, which he dictated to the warden as he lay dying. Per Allen's instructions, after his death the book he dictated was bound in Allen's skin and given to James Fenno, the one man who had fought back when Allen tried to rob him. The Highwayman remained in Fenno's family for many years until it was donated to the Boston Athenaeum, where it remains today. I saw the book once when it was on display. It's small, gray, and unassuming. You'd never guess it was covered in human skin. 

The Highwayman. Image from Atlas Obscura. 

Two libraries in Cincinnati, Ohio also have copies of a book bound in human skin. The book is Poems of Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Boston poet Phyllis Wheatley. Wheatley is famous for being the first published Black poet in North America; she died from pneumonia in 1784 at the age of 31. Poems of Various Subjects was quite popular when it was published in London in 1773, but it's unclear why these two copies were covered in skin and who it came from. 

Image from the Preservation Lab Blog.

The Wellcome Collection, a museum and library in London, owns a small notebook with silver clasps supposedly bound in the skin of Crispus Attucks, the Indigenous/Black man killed by British soldiers in 1770 at the Boston Massacre. The book was created around 1780. A handwritten label on it reads: "The cover of this book is made of Tanned Skin from the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence." 

Reading about this book made me very uncomfortable. It's one thing for James Allen to bind The Highwayman in his own skin, but it's another thing entirely for someone, probably a white Englishman, to bind a book in the skin of an Indigenous/Black man killed in a political uprising. It reeks of oppression and exoticization. Happily, testing has shown that this book is not bound in Crispus Attucks's skin, or in any human skin at all. It's bound in leather from an animal, probably a horse, camel, or goat. In other words, it's a fake. 

Some scholars have pointed out that the skin of marginalized people was often used in anthropodermic bibliopegy. That's certainly the case with the copy of Des Destinees de L'Ame (Destinies of the Soul) owned by Harvard. The book, written in 1879 by Arsène Houssaye, and was covered in human skin by Ludovic Bouland, a French doctor, using the skin of a woman who died in a psychiatric hospital. A handwritten note by Bouland says "a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering." Creepy.

In 2024, Harvard decided the skin on Des Destinees had not been given with consent; they removed it and placed it in storage. The university is still determining the best way to dispose of it. 

Havard is not the only university with a book like this. Brown has four anthropodermic books in its collection, including two copies of Dance of Death (featuring prints by Hans Holbein) and Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (On the Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Books). Testing has proven the books are indeed bound in human skin, but Brown does not know whose it is. They have been taken out of circulation, but remain intact. 

The fourth book at Brown is a copy of Adolphe Belot's 1870 novel, Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife, a steamy novel about a lesbian love affair. A letter from Samuel Loveman, dated November 10, 1936, accompanies the book. (Loveman was a bookseller and close friend of Rhode Island horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.) It's addressed to W. Easton Loutitt, the university's archivist at the time, and says that "[we] are assured by our consignee that this book is of unquestioned authenticity so far as the human skin binding is concerned." Once again, it's not clear who the skin came from. 

When I was younger, I was more enthusiastic for morbid curiosities like these anthropodermic books. I probably would have bought one if I could. As I've gotten older, my enthusiasm has waned a little bit. Yes, they're products of a different time when people held different ideas about the human body, but now that I'm almost 60 I find myself identifying more with the people whose skin was used to cover the books, and less with the people who did the binding.