Episode 18: People Leather: Books bound in Human Skin

Ever wonder if books could really be bound in human skin? Where did this skin come from? Did you put the lotion in the basket? Answer all these questions and more today as we explore Anthropodermic Bibliopegy and the men who made these urban legends come to life.

Listener Warning: Mentions of Murder and Skinning

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Music Credit:
"Midday Dance" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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"Waltz (Tschikovsky Op. 40)" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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Main Theme:
"Dream Catcher" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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Transcript

Episode 18: People Leather:Books bound in Human Skin 

1. Hello and Welcome to the Odder podcast. I’m your host Madison Paige, and today we are heading into the archives to look at some old text bound in questionable covers. Be sure to wear some gloves because you never know what or who you could be touching. Today on The Odder, we are talking about Books bound in Human Skin and the legitimacy of this urban legend. So get those library cards ready and let's go!
2. Hello, Greetings, Salutations and Good Moon as we gather round my table for another episode of The Odder. If you are new, Welcome Welcome, on The Odder we are a bag of trail mix as we discuss all the strange, unsolved, unexplained and just plain odd things about the world and the people in it. To all those returning, welcome back! I hope we all had a grand old time with our buddy the Lone Star Tick last episode. I don’t know about you but I was feeling a little itchy and scratchy just writing it up. If you really enjoyed that episode or this one remember to leave us a rating and review and subscribe on your favorite streaming service. Today we are talking all things books bound in human skin and as such I do have to issue a warning that there will be discussion and mention of murder and for lack of a better word Skinning of humans that some may find disturbing so listener discretion is advised but I wont be getting too graphic. But let’s get right on in, everyone get comfy, get cozy, maybe grab some lotion, our skin can never be too moisturized as we jump right into our book binding, grave robbing tale of terrifying antiquity. 
3. So let’s talk skin. Your skin specifically. Did you know that skin is considered the body's largest organ? Each inch of skin is made up of nearly 19 million cells. Not only is it the bag that holds our bones and organs inside, it offers specialized immune protection, regulates temperature, and even becomes completely renewed every 28 days. Hard working and, as I’m sure you guessed, vitally necessary, skin also offers us individuality and identity as ever skin is unique with its smattering of freckles, moles, scars, stretch marks, and the decorations we attach like piercings and tattoos. 
4. Skin is also often used to put a fright into us. The horror genre has pulled on our fear of a body without skin and a skin without a body for decades. Just look at the leather face, the texas chainsaw massacre, I was personally victimized by The Evil Dead remake in 2013 when the girl cuts her skin off in the bathtub, ick. And I’ll be the last to say the line “Put the lotion in the basket” hasn't resonated in our culture. Even real life terrors like Ed Gein and his lampshades and belts made from human hide have inspired nightmares and fascination within us. And why shouldn't it? People are obsessed with skin. Americans spend an average of 15,ooo dollars on skin care in their lifetime. That is about $323 a year on moisturizers, sunscreens, serums, masks, oils, balms, cleansers, and everything else you can think of. We tan in the sun and when the sun is gone we rub self tanners on until we look like anthropomorphic gingerbread men. We soak in baths made of ice, mud, and scalding water filled with salt, oil, bath bombs, flower petals, bubbles, and rubber duckies till we come out svelt. We buff, scrape, steam, lift, tighten, and massage our otter layers like its a second job. Suffice to say that humans have an innate obsession with skin. 
5. So, it is not surprising that the possibility of books bound in human skin would entice us. When we think of these books we picture wrinkled covers with eyes and a gaping mouth like the picture used for the sneak peek but the reality of this is that most books bound with this particular leather look remarkably similar to other books. If you stumble across an old book bound in what looks like cow or sheep skin, you may actually be holding one of these gruesome grimoires. 
6. This act is technically referred to as Anthropodermic Bibliopegy and was most common during the 19th century. While several museums, archives, and private collectors have claimed to possess these objects, they are actually pretty rare. The Anthropodermic Book Project examined 31 of the 50 books in public institutions that were claimed to have been of people leather but as of April 2022, only 18 of these have been confirmed human. Binding books in human skin was never a standard and all the examples we have of these were bound by hobbyists. Book Binding is actually still a fairly common hobby where people print and assemble stories, manuscripts, or raw journals in their homes. This hobby is cheap and fairly easy and many turn it into a side business. It was just as popular in the 19th century but the use of human skin was a rarity. As you can imagine, it is not an easy supply to get. Most of the books in this category with authentic skin were bound by doctors or people with access to cadavers. The act was mainly meant to impress others and confer upon the doctor a sort of bragging right. Keep in mind, that at this time, laws governing the care of bodies and the rights conferred upon them were extremely lax. While now we would be aghast at the idea of our doctor slicing up a body to bind a book, back then it was an accepted commodity. 
7. Take for instance a certain Dr. John Stockton Hough. Coming from a wealthy family, Hough pursued his degree at University of Pennsylvania where he demonstrated an interest in reproductive medicine and parasites. His inherited wealth and occupation allowed him to pursue outside interests, namely the collecting of rare books. He was fanatical about collecting medical books that dated to the very invention of the printing press. He would send letters to book sellers in Europe with certain books he was looking for in the hopes to expand his collection. He was a member of the Grolier Club in New York which was a high society book club and graciously showed off his massive collection to anyone that asked. Except for his own children who were only allowed in the library on sundays. By age 50, it was estimated he had grown his collection to 8.000 rare texts. But among these wide shelves with their jaw dropping texts and rare illustrations lay three simple looking books. Nothing about them stood out or drew the eye of any curios reporter or fellow book lover but they were exceptionally unique because these three books were bound using the skin cut from the thigh of Mary Lynch and they had been bound by Hough himself. 
8. Mary Lynch was a 28 year old irish widow who tragically died in Ward 27 in Philadelphia General Hospital. The ward was nicknamed Old Blockley and was designated for use as a hospital, poor house, orphanage, and insane asylum. Mary had been admitted with Tuberculosis and while her family meant well when visiting with ham sandwiches they unfortunately did not notice the meat contained signs of roundworm infection. This parasite would invade Mary and leach to Trichinosis which compromised her already weakened immune system. She died in January of 1869 where she then ended up on the autopsy table of Dr. John Stockton Hough. Nobody really knows why but Hough decided to remove the skin from Mary’s thighs and preserve them in a chamber pot for several years. However, decades later, he would use them to bind three of his favorite medical books on women's health and reproduction. These three novels bound in the skin of a woman who had not consented nor deserved this treatment would sit in Hough’s library until Hough died at age 56 after a runaway horse threw him from his carriage and the bulk of his prized collected went to the university of pennsylvania and the library at the college of physicians of philadelphia. 
9. Hough would also own another of Hough's human bound books although the doctor had neglected to name the man the skin was taken from. The book contained only a note on the inside that stated it was bound in Trenton, New Jersey in March 1887 using the skin from around the wrist of a man who died in the philadelphia hospital in 1969. The skin was used because the man had a tattoo although it is not apparent in the finished binding. All four of Hough’s books currently reside at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. I’ll post a picture of them on the socials just so you can see how unassuming they look. 
10. The use of patients either in asylums, hospitals, or unclaimed at the morgue was the most common way of securing the skin needed for the bindings. Most of these bodies ended up in mass paupers graves and as such no fuss was made about what happened to the body before it got there. 
11. If that is upsetting to you it should be. It is a violation to human nature to think of something like this happening to anyone let alone a loved one or ourselves. Mary Lynch was a poor woman who had lost her husband and then suffered at the hands of illness and parasite and she did not consent to then have the skin removed from her thighs to satisfy a cheap thrill by a doctor with a book obsession. And more startling was that Hough was not alone in this practice. Dr. Ludovic Bouland took a book that his friend gave him and bound it in the skin of an unclaimed female patient from a mental asylum that died of a stroke. Several other suspected and waiting to be tested books came from the practice of a doctor with deplorable scruples. 
12.  Not all of these books originated from patients, the use of criminals was also common. Two of the most famous examples are that of John Horwood in 1821 and William Corder in 1828. Both of these men were hanged and the skin removed from their bodies following execution. 
13. John Horwood was convicted of the murder of Eliza Balsom in Bristol England. The story goes that Horwood was infatuated by Eliza and proposed to her often which she always turned down. On January 25 1821, Horwood saw Eliza with another boy and threw a stone which struck her in the temple. She developed an infection and died. This has been heavily disputed in later years that Eliza actually died due to an invasive procedure conducted by the doctor and bound in unclean dressings. The doctor was the one who then gave the name of Horwood to the police, the doctor then testified against him in the trial which led to his hanging, and after his body was taken from the Gallows, the same doctor removed skin from his body, tanned it, and used it to bind a book contiaing documentation on the murder, trial, execution, and disseaction of Horwood. The book currently resides in the collections of Bristol Archives. The doctor would also keep the skeleton in his house until his death where it would be given to the Bristol Royal Infirmary and later to Bristol University where it would hang with a noose on its neck to show its status as the remains of a convicted felon. 
14. Bet you didn't think you’d lose some faith in doctors on today’s show did you? 
15. William Cordor was another such man. He was convicted in the Murder of Maria Marten at the Red Barn, a local landmark where the two lovers were meeting to elope and run away together. Although, Cordor sent letters to Maria’s family claiming she was well, they became suspicious following a dream where the stepmother reported that Maria had been murdered. Her remains were discovered in the barn the next year. Cordor was tracked down in London where he had married another woman. He was tried and found guilty and was hanged on August 11th, 1828. His body was then taken to the courtroom at shire hall where after the hangman claimed his trousers and stocking, which was apparently a thing they did back then, his abdomen was cut open and crowds were allowed to file past to look at it. His body was then used for a class in Cambridge university where they showed how muscles contract using a battery hooked up to his muscles. His skeleton would be used as a teaching aid in West Suffolk Hospital until 2004 when it would be cremated and his skin was tanned by Surgeon George Creed and used to bind an account of the murder.
16.  Now while the patients and the criminals had no choice in the use of their skin as a cover, some people did opt for it. One of the most famous examples of AUTOanthropodermi Bibliopegy is the book The Highwayman, an account of the life of JAme Allen who was a convicted criminal awaiting execution. He dictated his memoirs to the warden who wrote it down. Allen then asked that his book be bound in his own skin and given to John Fenno Jr, the man who had accused him of attempted murder and lef to his death sentence. This request was carried out and Genno held onto the books until a descendant of his donated them to the Boston Athenaeum. While in the possession of the Fenno family, the book was apparently used as a paddle to scold naughty children. 
17. While never found, an article in 1933 from the Harvard Crimson talks of a miniature book titled Little Poems for Little Folk that was bound using 20 inches of skin taken from a donor who was happy and healthy following the removal. The book went into private ownership and it is not currently known where it is. 
18. Many more examples await testing although many have been debunked. The books soon proved to be sheepskin, pigskin, or good imitation leather. So how is this tested? Well, scientists use two methods to determine what material a book is bound with. You may think we can simply DNA test or by examining hair follicles found in the leather but both of these tests risk contamination and are usually rendered helpless by the tanning process. Instead, Peptide mass fingerprinting or PMF and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization or MALDI are proving to be the most useful. They take a small sample of the cover and proteins within it are identified using collagen analysis. This can help rule out what species contributed to the skin used. Then PMF can show whether the skin used belongs to a primate. Since monkeys were almost never a source used for bindings, this could suggest the primate used was a human.
19.  Having a human skin book is not necessarily a glamor. MAny archivists feel the books suck all the attention away from other tolmes which can prove to be more interesting. The books bound in the flesh are not even that exciting in most circumstances, take for instance Dr. Hough’s book Catalog if Medical Sciences bound in the flesh of a human but inside turns out to be little more than a directory. 
20. Humans will always have a fascination with the macabre. We always have and we always will. While books like these are thankfully a practice of the past, we can take comfort in the fact that our forefathers were just as strange as we are. And truly this proves that you cannot judge a book by its cover.
21. Well, that's all for this episode. So what do you think? Which doctor do you think was the most out there? Do you think John Horwood was guilty or set up by that doctor? Do you think it’s morally wrong for us to keep these books on display? Let us know what you think on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and leave a review. The Odder Pod is now on TikTok. Come follow us there! Have a suggestion for a show? Send me an email at theodderpod@gmail.com with your request and whether you’d like me to mention your name, your alias, or nothing at all. Remember this is The Odder Side so give me something cool, creepy, or confusing to deep dive for you. If you liked the show, leave us a review! They really help! Let’s all stay moisturized and put on the sunscreen. You only get one skin and if it ends up on a book, you don’t want it looking dry!  The Odder Podcast posts every other Thursday. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time on The Odder side.