In case you were wondering, yes, human skin can hold the pages of a book together. Harvard University’s rare book library has discovered that one of its books is actually bound in human skin.
The Houghton Library has a copy of Des destinées de l’ame (Destinies of the Soul in English) by French author Arsène Houssaye. Conservators and scientists did tests to determine that the 19th century book was definitely bound using human skin, the university said.
According to NBC News, Harvard says that Houssaye gave the book to the famous Dr. Ludovic Bouland in the mid-1880s. Bouland then took the skin from an unclaimed female patient’s body to bind the book after the patient died from a stroke. The text considers what happens after death.
For anyone wondering why he made the bizarre and creepy decision, Bouland wrote a note in the book to explain, Harvard said.
“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,” Bouland’s message in French reads in part. “It is interesting to see the different aspects that change this skin according to the method of preparation to which it is subjected. Compare for example with the small volume I have in my library, Sever. Pinaeus de Virginitatis notis which is also bound in human skin but tanned with sumac.”
Scientists at the university were only 99 percent sure that the binding is made from human skin. The team took microscopic samples from the book and analysed it using peptide mass fingerprinting. While the peptide mass fingerprint did discount what was commonly used to bind books at the time, they actually could not 100 percent for certain count out other primates. So, they had to analyze amino acids, which, Bill Lane, director of the Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Library, said allowed them to determine that it is “very unlikely that the source could be other than human.”
Harvard did say that while this is the only book they have in their library that’s bound in human skin, the technique wasn’t uncommon in the late 19th century.