![]() Tests to rule out apes The tests, taking. Image via Houghton Library, Harvard University. Houghton’s book is now the only known book at Harvard bound in human skin, said the library, the college’s main repository for rare books and manuscripts. According to Bill Lane, the director of the Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, "The analytical data, taken together with the provenance of Des destinées de l'ame, make it very unlikely that the source could be other than human." In a gruesome side-note, the Harvard catalogue record reports that the book was bound in the skin "of the unclaimed body of a woman patient in a French mental hospital who died suddenly of apoplexy." But in this case, scientific tests provided proof "without a doubt" that the book is the real thing. Smith chronicles some of these stories in a chapter in the new Morbid Anatomy Anthology. Often these stories are just that-in fact, two other bindings at Houghton recently tested turned out to be sheepskin. ![]() When I visited the Charles Blockson Collection at Temple University a dozen years ago, I recall being told that the copy of Dale Carnegie's Lincoln biography in my hands was bound in the skin of an African-American man. A few years ago, Harvard librarians discovered that the covers of three of the books in their 15-million-volume collection were bound not with leather but with tanned, human flesh. deposited at Harvards Houghton Library in 1934, contains a manuscript note. anthropodermic bibliopegy-are not terribly uncommon. Tests Show 19th-century Book In Harvard University is Bound in Human Skin. Harvard's Houghton Library announced this week that one of its books, Des destinées de l'ame, is bound in human skin.
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