Dark Archives: Judge These Books By Their Cover

Megan Rosenbloom

BY SAGE MATKIN

2 words: anthropodermic bibliopegy. Let’s break that down into their Greek roots. Anthropos for human, derma for skin, biblion for book, and pegia for fasten. All together, the practice of binding books in human skin. You might have a lot of questions, as I hope one would about this morbid practice, and I will devote this article to answering some common Qs. If you have further questions, or would like to read a fine novel about this curiosity, check out Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom.

To start off, let’s look into the ‘specifics’ of wrapping a book in human skin. To begin this process, let’s jump back a couple centuries to the height of this practice, the 1800s and earlier–some anthropodermic books were made later but are exceedingly rare. Those in possession of these strange books were elitists, political figures, intellectuals, and most horrifying, doctors; collections of macabre books were used as displays of wealth amongst one’s personal library, the more the better they believed. Human skin was preserved most commonly in chamber pots, where urine was actually used to preserve the skin. To bind the books, most bibliophiles brought their supplies to human-skin binding professionals.

The story of Mary Lynch is a particularly horrifying one. In 1868, Lynch was a tuberculosis patient at the Philidelphia General Hospital who succumbed to her illness; her body was kept by Dr. John Stockton Hough, a young doctor at the hospital who when Lynch died, removed skin from her thighs and kept them in his private collection for decades. As Hough climbed the societal ladder, his wealth was only becoming more obvious in bibliophile circles. Per the fad of the time, Hough used the skin to rebind selected books, such as Les nouvelles découvertes sur toutes les parties principales de l’homme, et de la femme (1680), and Speculations on the Mode and Appearances of Impregnation in the Human Female (1789). The selected books were of high value to Hough, who specialized in women’s health.

Researchers of the Anthropodermic Book Project use various methods to decipher the authenticity of anthropodermic books. The first method of distinguishing which animals’ skin was used for binding is to look at the pore patterns created by hair follicles. The arrangement of human hair follicles differ from that of a pig or cow, however these patterns can fade and change over time, making it a less reliable form of identification. The second method is the most prominent in research because of its accuracy. Peptide Mass Fingerprinting (PMF) uses a tiny piece of binding that interacts with trypsin, a digestive enzyme, to create a mixture. This mixture is dropped onto a matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization plate (MALDI) then undergoes mass spectrometry to identify peptides found in the binding. These peptides create the “fingerprint” which shows protein markers, allowing researchers to decipher based on the markers which animal family was used for the binding. Researchers can then match the fingerprint to that of the Hominidae family to affirm a true anthropodermic book.