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After years of criticism and controversy, Harvard University, among the most famous and prestigious in the United States, announced that it had removed the binding of a book kept in its library which was a little different from the others: it had been made using human skin. According to the managers of the Harvard Library, the removal was necessary “due to the ethically complex nature of the book’s origins and its history”, even if until some time ago the library itself had presented the volume as a rarity, sometimes using tones amused and joking to describe the binding.
Anthropodermic bibliopegy, i.e. the practice of binding books using human skin, was used especially in the seventeenth century, but never had widespread diffusion, at least judging by the few dozen volumes known today that were certainly bound in this way. Especially thanks to the evolution of genetic material analysis techniques, in recent decades it has become easier to confirm or not the human origin of the bindings, which has also made it possible to exclude some volumes for which there was insufficient evidence.
The book kept in the Harvard Library is an edition of Destinées de l’ame by the French writer and poet Arsène Houssaye who lived in the nineteenth century. The American diplomat John B. Stetson had purchased it and brought it to the library in the early 1930s. The binding had been made by its first owner, a French doctor, who had included a note in the volume in which he said that “a book on the human soul deserves to have a human binding”. Stetson later discovered that the doctor had obtained human skin to bind the volume from the corpse of a woman who died in a psychiatric hospital in France.
For some time the actual origin of the binding remained unknown, but in 2014 an article on the library’s blog (later removed) confirmed that it was human skin with somewhat amused tones: «Good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and at the same time cannibals.” A few years later, some academics spontaneously formed a working group to study the issue and put pressure on Harvard, asking that the binding be removed and that the woman’s remains be brought back to France for a proper burial. Recently the group had also sent an open letter to the rector of the university to obtain what was requested.
Harvard University therefore decided to proceed with the removal of the old binding and apologized for having “objectified and compromised the human dignity” of those who were unwillingly involved in the affair. However, the library clarified that since 2015 various limitations had been imposed for the consultation of that volume, including for research purposes. Now the book can be consulted online and physically thanks to a new binding, while it will take months if not years to decide what to do with the old human skin binding.
