anthropodermic bibliopegy /AN-throh-pə-DəR-mik BIB-lee-OP-əjy/. noun. Bookbinding with human skin.
I have to admit: I get excited by bookbinding talk. Digital books—digital publications, really—have their own allure, but even if all the books I own and yearn for existed digitally (and they most definitely don’t), there’s something about the physical construction of good old fashioned books that I just can’t quit.
And bookbinding and book art, like many handcrafts which have distinct, but distinctly different, parallels in the digital world, is experiencing a welcome resurgence at every level, from classical and DIY hand binding to the exquisite one-of-a-kind pieces by book artists as various as Margo Klass, Richard Minsky and Mark Cockram (to name a few of my favorites).
I’ve even tried my own hand (and my patience, and my limits) at bookbinding, though my results were forgettable. As Michael Innes put it in one of his Inspector Appleby novels:
Appleby, although hazy about bibliopegy, was quite certain he wasn’t a distinguished student of it.
bibliopegy is an old term for bookbinding derived from the Greek biblio- (used to indicate something is related to books) and pegia (to fasten or fix). You won’t see or hear bibliopegy in use much nowadays except as part of a reference to one curious—and creepy—type of book construction: anthropodermic bibliopegy or binding with human skin. Sometimes this practice was considered part of the process of justice being done, at other times a tribute and memorial, and occasionally a matter of art, making tattoos, nipples, fingernail beds and in a few cases spooky images of the face part of the finished product.
Though not known to ever have been a common practice, historians believe that anthropodermic bibliopegy goes back significantly further than the earliest surviving verified examples from the early 1800s. Herodotus mentions, in passing as if it were routine, the pre-Christian Era Scythians flaying humans and tanning their skin, and where there are such common practices, practical uses tend to follow.
As a binding method, anthropodermic bibliopegy appears to have peaked during the French Revolution when, sadly, the demand for such bindings met the unfortunate supply of wartime casualties…and a growing professionalization of medicine that, along with many positive benefits, also spurred a growth in the perception of patients as disembodied collections of symptoms, the intellectualized distance all the better for using this part of their bodies too.
The most famous example of anthropodermic bibliopegy is a copy of James Allen’s 1837 autobiographical work with the mouthful (sorry) of a title The 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. Though multiple copies of the book still exist, references to “The Highwayman” inevitably refer to the volume bound, at Allen’s own request, in his skin, and bequeathed to John A. Fenno, who had apparently been the only person to successfully resist being robbed by Allen.
Criminal skin was often used to bind books, and not usually voluntarily. Father Henry Garnet, who along with Guy Fawkes and others took part in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up England’s House of Lords, was sentenced to death by being drawn and quartered, and his skin used to bind volumes of books listing his crimes, including one in which you can clearly make out his face. John Harwood, AKA The Red Barn Murderer, was convicted and hanged and his skin used to bind a copy of the trial proceedings. Similarly, William Burke, one-half of the infamous Burke and Hare duo convicted of murdering 16 people and selling the corpses to an Edinburgh doctor for dissection, was himself dissected and some of his skin used to bind a notebook and a card case which you can still see in the Surgeon’s Hall museum in Endinburgh.
Burke’s end was, in fact, the beginning of the end of the heyday of anthropodermic bibliopegy. The grisly trade in bodies that motivated Burke and Hare brought to light the need for a legitimate source of cadavers for scientific research, a problem “solved” by creating an act that both authorized dissection on unclaimed workhouse bodies and outlawed the practice of making anatomization part of death sentences.
But not all examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy were the result of such unhappy ends. In his book My Life with Paper, the paper-making book designer Dard Hunter tells the story of being commissioned by a young widow to produce a hand-lettered book of eulogies memorializing her late husband. After rejecting the various skins Hunter offered, the widow produced a roll of leather she wanted to be used. Hunter, unable to identify the source, asked the widow what it was and she told him it was the skin from her late husband’s back. The punchline? A few years later Dard saw an announcement that his client was re-marrying…and he wondered if the husband-to-be thought of himself as “Volume 2?”
Despite my occasionally deeply felt response to a finely bound book, I’m not quite as ready to advocate for the return of anthropodermic bibliopegy as I am the second half of the phrase itself. But I am fascinated by the very fascination so many people have with those “manskin” (as Edwin Zehnsdorf called the material) books.
In her book Original Skin: Exploring the Marvels of the Human Hide—the kind of brilliant, serendipitous discovery that makes this kind of research so much fun–Maryrose Cuskelly explores her own conflicted feelings about these artifacts. She writes:
To me, such volumes are the Hannibal Lecters of cultural objects, with the unholy allure of the serial killer swirling around them. There is the whiff of the occult about them, but also of the slaughterhouse. It is the twinning of the human hide (more graphic evidence of death and bodily obliteration would be hard to find) with that most potent symbol of human culture and learning—the book—that creates a dissonance at once fascinating and repulsive.
And then, finally holding one such book in her hands, Cuskelly observes:
Enmeshed within and without this slim volume of poetry were enough contradictions to spin off a welter of thoughts. It represents the epitome of objectification of the body, entangled with the impulse to capture knowledge, culture, and experience in a form that will persevere long after the life that created it has been extinguished. An emphatic full stop to someone’s life, yet entwined with the ongoing project of humanity, the volume also underlines our species’ capacity for cruelty.
It turns out to be very difficult to prove that a book is (or isn’t) bound with a particular kind of skin and thanks to the ongoing Anthropodermic Book Project, we are only now learning that some books claimed to be human-clad are not…and vice-versa. This makes our bibliodermal preoccupation even more interesting and puzzling. Useful DNA is usually absent in the bindings and the tanned skin of pigs, in particular, is so close in appearance as to be practically indistinguishable from our own. That examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy are so hard to discern from those that come courtesy of our bacon-bearing, pork-rinded porcine pals says something about such books and our deep interest in them…I’m just not sure I want to know what it is.
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