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. 

H.P. Lovecraft's Ghost Appeared at This House

In 1971 the ghost of H.P. Lovecraft appeared to a Brown University undergraduate living in an apartment at 10 Barnes Street in Providence, Rhode Island. Lovecraft, a well-known author of horror and weird fiction, lived in this building from 1926 until 1933. He died in 1937 from intestinal cancer exacerbated by malnutrition.

The appearance of Lovecraft's ghost is briefly mentioned, as if it were no big deal, on page 441 of L. Sprague de Camp's H.P. Lovecraft: A Biography (1975). No big deal?! It's the ghost of H.P. Lovecraft!

10 Barnes Street, Providence, Rhode Island.

I'm assuming that de Camp didn't believe the story, and probably no one else did since it doesn't appear in many places. Lovecraft himself was a staunch materialist and didn't believe in the human soul so he wouldn't believe this story either. But let's suppose for a moment this story is true and that Lovecraft's ghost really did manifest to a Brown student in 1971. Why would he appear at 10 Barnes Street and in that particular year?

Ghosts allegedly appear in places to which they have strong emotional connections. We've all heard stories about ghosts appearing in the places where they were murdered, but ghosts also appear at locations where they had positive emotional experiences. That might be the case here. Lovecraft spent his most productive and successful years as a writer at 10 Barnes Street. While living there he wrote some of his most famous stories, including "Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror," and "At The Mountains of Madness." Perhaps his spirit had fond memories and didn't want to leave.

Ghosts are also said to appear when they have unfinished business. They show up when they want someone to bury their undiscovered body or send a message to their surviving loved ones. I don't think Lovecraft's ghost appeared in 1971 to reveal any dark secrets, but he probably had a lot of unresolved issues. His childhood and adolescence were like something from a Gothic novel: both parents dying in an insane asylum, the slow dissipation of his family's wealth, his mother telling him he was too hideous to be seen publicly, and a nervous breakdown in his teenage years.

A statue of Lovecraft at the Providence Art Club.

His adult life was also quite complicated and full of contradctions. Here a few examples:

• Lovecraft was a racist and an anti-Semite, yet he married the Jewish immigrant Sonia Greene and was best friends with Samuel Loveman, a gay Jewish poet to whom he dedicated the homo-erotic short story "Hypnos."
• Lovecraft seemed to have little interest in sex but his stories are full of bestiality, incest and intercourse with monsters.
• Lovecraft lived most of his life in poverty but thought full-time work was beneath him. Towards the end of his life he survived on a near-starvation diet but spent his meager income on postage answering letters from anyone who wrote to him. According to one estimate he wrote up to 100,000 letters.
• Lovecraft didn't believe in the supernatural, but based many of his stories on dreams and nightmares so vivid that some occultists are convinced he really had access to occult secrets. 

So, I think it's very likely that Lovecraft's ghost (if it exists) has some unfinished business.

Ghosts may also be vengeful, appearing because they are angry at the living. But why would Lovecraft be angry at a Brown undergrad? Maybe because Lovecraft always wanted to attend Brown University and study astronomy but couldn't even finish high school due to his fragile mental state. Perhaps after death his ghost appeared to berate whichever poor Brown student was living at 10 Barnes Street in 1971. I can also imagine that a student at that time could be a long-haired hippie, something that might also anger the conservative author. 

Of course this is all just speculation on my part. Lovecraft's ghost probably didn't even appear at Barnes Street. However, if you want to find out, you can rent an apartment there. Nothing is available right now, but it looks like they rent for around $1,200/month.  Maybe the next time one comes on the market someone will find out for sure if the ghost of H.P. Lovecraft is still lingering around Providence. 

*****

I was inspired to write this because this past weekend was I attending NecronomiCon 2019, the bi-annual H.P. Lovecraft convention in Providence. I was browsing through Rory Raven's Haunted Providence: Strange Tales From The Smallest State (2008) to prepare for my trip and read the story about 10 Barnes Street. Raven's book directed me back to the original source, de Camp's biography of Lovecraft.