The bodies of executed criminals were also donated to science, the author notes, the skins distributed to tanners and bookbinders.
#Harvard university library books bound in human skin skin
The term for this outdated practice is anthropodermic bibliopegy, and it originated in the 16th century.Īccording to the blog post's author, Heather Cole, an assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Houghton library - starting in the 1500s, the confessions of criminals were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted. Two other tomes that were believed to share this strange distinction have since been tested, and they are bound in something less controversial - sheepskin.īut as an earlier blog post from Harvard's Houghton Library explains, the practice of binding books in human skin isn't as unusual as it may sound. This discovery marks the first time that one of Harvard's rare books was determined to be bound in human skin. "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," Lane said in a statement. This method allowed them to determine the order of amino acids in the samples' peptides and further revealed that the binding was almost certainly human. To rule out other primates, the researchers further analyzed samples from the binding using the liquid chromatography chemical analysis. "However, although the PMF was consistent with human, other closely related primates, such as the great apes and gibbons, could not be eliminated because of the lack of necessary references," the researchers said in their results. The technique, which identifies proteins by identifying the masses of their peptides and then matches that with proteins in a database, helped to reveal the source of the binding material.īill Lane, director of the Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, and Daniel Kirby, of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard, said that the PMF from "Des destinées de l'ame" matched the human reference sample and clearly eliminated other common parchment sources, like sheep, cattle and goat. The peptide mass fingerprinting technique used by researchers required that microscopic samples be taken from various locations on the binding, the Houghton Library blog reports. Using several different methods, including peptide mass fingerprinting and a type of liquid chromatography, the researchers concluded with 99 percent certainty that the binding is of human origin.
Pinaeus de Virginitatis notis which is also bound in human skin but tanned with sumac."ĭespite this fairly straightforward clue, it wasn't until yesterday that scientists at Harvard confirmed that Bouland's bizarre choice of material wasn't a hoax. Compare for example with the small volume I have in my library, Sever. It is interesting to see the different aspects that change this skin according to the method of preparation to which it is subjected. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman. By looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. The note, originally written in French and here translated by Harvard, reads: "This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance.
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