The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  It is not known if the original owners of the bindings gave their permission for such use. Some of the human leather used for these medical and religious books is likely to have come from poor patients whose bodies were unclaimed after their deaths in hospital.

  Harvard’s Langdell Law Library has a Spanish law manual from 1605 bound in human skin. An inscription explains that the binding is the skin of the owner’s dear friend, one Jonas Wright, who was skinned alive by an African tribe in 1632. The book, ‘being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions’, was returned to his friend along with a piece of his skin for the binding.

  The French Revolution, which provided a wealth of corpses, appears to have inspired a number of human book bindings. Several copies of the French constitution of 1793 were said to be bound in the skin of some of the revolution’s countless victims. Royalists spread the rumour that the revolutionaries kept a vast tannery of human skin at Meudon. It was alleged in 1794 that in Angers human skins were also tanned to make riding breeches for army officers.

  The early nineteenth century saw new sources of human leather emerge from the law courts. In Great Britain, wealthy book collectors were able to buy the skins of criminals who had been executed and anatomized. It was considered a part of the punishment that the offender would know in advance that his body was to be dissected by the surgeons. This was the fate of the notorious grave-robber William Burke, executed in 1829. After a public dissection, a piece of his body was tanned, and made into a wallet.

  Sometimes the skins of criminals were used to bind accounts of their deeds and their trials, execution and eventual dissection. This was the case with John Horword, hanged for the murder of Eliza Balsum in 1821. A copy of his book – in every sense – is at Bristol’s City Record Office, inscribed ‘Cutis Vera Johannis Horwood’ and decorated with skulls and crossbones. At Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds, there’s a similar volume on – and in – William Corder, the infamous killer of Maria Martin in the ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ scandal of 1828. The museum also displays Corder’s scalp and ear. Two copies of the memoirs of the irrepressible highwayman James Allen, alias George Walton, were bound with his own skin in 1837 with a stamped inscription ‘Hic Liber Waltonis cute compactus est’. Walton had requested that a copy be given to one John Fenno, one of his victims, who had impressed the criminal with a brave resistance when attacked. The other was given to his doctor. Fenno’s family eventually gifted the book to Boston Athenaeum’s library.

  There is one story of a woman requesting that her skin be used to bind a book. A young noblewoman was dying of tuberculosis, a disease which, in its latter phases, sometimes shows erotic symptoms. Although they had never met, she became obsessed with the French writer and astronomist Camille Flammarion, who had captured the public’s imagination with his works on the stars and his theories of life on other planets. One version of the tale claims that the woman summoned him to her, announcing that she planned to bestow a gift he could not refuse. Another account insists that she had her hero’s portrait tattooed on her back, leaving orders for her doctor to cut it out of her when she died so that it might be tanned and sent to Flammarion to bind his next book. Whatever the truth of the story, it appears that a copy of Flammarion’s Les terres du ciel was indeed bound with female skin in 1882. In a gilt inscription, the binding is described as ‘a pious execution of an anonymous vow’. In a letter, Flammarion claimed that the woman was unknown to him, but acknowledged that he had received the skin. He observed ‘this fragment of a beautiful body is all that survives of it today, and it can endure lastingly in a perfect state of respectful preservation’.

  The Grolier Club of New York owns a volume entitled Le Traicte de Peyne: Poeme allegorique, published in Paris in 1867. The flyleaf is inscribed in pencil, ‘Bound in human skin’, though this claim has not been verified.

  A young German named Ernst Kauffmann sought a similar immortality. Despairing of success as a writer himself, he put together a book of Two Hundred Famous Men illustrated with woodcuts, requesting that it should be bound in his own skin after his death.

  Human skin scandals abounded at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, feeding a new taste for the macabre in a reading public desensitized by Jack the Ripper and other cases described in lurid details in the popular press. In 1883 the infamous Tewksbury Almshouse in Massachusetts was accused of selling the skin of its wretched inhabitants – principally the pauper insane – to local tanners. A whole industry in human hide was suspected. There was a tale of some French medical students being dismissed after being caught selling the breasts of dead female patients to the binders of obscene books in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. This led to an alleged sighting of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine et Juliette bound with a pair of human breasts.

  The Wellcome Collection in London has a gynaecological treatise that was originally printed in Holland in 1663. The title page reads: De Virginitatis notis, Graviditate & partu. It consists of a number of illustrated essays on the female reproductive tract, the first of which is a piece by Séverin Pineau on virginity, pregnancy and birth. At some point the volume was acquired by a doctor, Ludovic Bouland, who had an interest in bookplates and artistic bindings. Bouland was born in Metz and had graduated in medicine at Strasbourg in 1865, thereafter practising in Paris. Dr Bouland had the book rebound in the skin of a woman which he had obtained when he was a medical student.

  Bouland wrote inside: ‘This curious little book about virginity and the generative functions of women seeming to me to merit a re-rendering congruent with the subject, has been re-dressed in a piece of the skin of a woman tanned for myself with some sumac.’

  The identity of the woman is unknown. My descriptions of Gianni’s reactions to the book are based on my own, when I went to examine this volume at the Wellcome Library.

  It is not known what happened to the skin of Tupac Amaru II after his parts were displayed in different towns in Peru: the book bound in it is an invention.

  There are no records of Frankenstein or Pride and Prejudice being bound in human skin. However, both novels were first published in the period when this novel is set and Minguillo would have heard of the sensations they caused. Some novels have suffered human bindings, including a tattooed copy of The Three Musketeers, which belonged to a French doctor at the turn of the last century. (This same doctor is said to have had a copy of Mercier de Compiègne’s L’éloge du seins des femmes – In praise of women’s breasts – bound in the skin of a human breast, with the nipple clearly visible in the centre of the front cover.) There is also the case of an 1852 edition of Milton being rebound in the skin of the Exeter rat-catcher George Cudmore, who had killed his stepdaughter.

  And so it is very possible for an innocent book to have its original binding torn off and replaced by something more alarming. There may be many books of human skin as yet unidentified in public and private libraries around the world. The tanning process tends to darken human leather so it is indistinguishable from normal book bindings. A microscope and some expert knowledge are required to tell it apart from pigskin.

  Michelle Lovric,

  London and Venice, March 2010

  Acknowledgements

  This book’s research in Venice, Cuzco and Arequipa was completed with the help of a grant from the Arts Council, England. [logo required]. I would particularly like to thank Charles Beckett for his encouragement through the long process of writing this novel.

  I am indebted to William Helfand, Vladimir Lovric and Jane Topple for checking my medical history, to Dr Christopher Rowland Payne for casting his kind professional eye over dermatological detail, and to Kristina Blagojevitch for Spanish translations and editorial assistance.

  On the island of San Servolo, I was given generous access to the manicomio archives by Professor Luigi Armiato of la Fondazione I.R.S.E.C. Simon Chaplin at the Hunterian Museum in London was generous with time and advice.

  Dennis Vandervelde, President of the D
isinfected Mail Study Circle, advised me on the quarantine procedures, and organised an unforgettable trip to the deserted island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio in Venice’s lagoon during the summer of 2008. Alessandro Fuga and Roberto Roselli from the Consorzio Venezia Nuova were kind enough to show us around the island, along with Dottore Umberto Bocus.

  For access to materials and people in Arequipa, I thank Francesco Bandarin and Luis Sardón and also Giovanna Salini at the Peruvian Embassy in London.

  I am grateful to Silvia Evangelisti and Mary Laven for their expertise on Venetian nuns.

  In Santa Catalina, I was given every variety of help a writer and researcher could desire by Bradley W. Silva, then director, by Isabel and Carmen Olivares, restorers at the convent, and most particularly by both Dante Zegarra and Alejandro Málaga Núñez-Zeballos, historians of the city of Arequipa. The Santa Catalina guide Laura Salazar García helped me find physical contexts for all the turns of my plot inside the convent. I am also grateful to Mauricio Romañes for background on Arequipa and its history.

  The historians Kathryn Burns and Sarah Chambers were both generous with advice and help, though any factual errors that cannot be conveniently attributed to deliberate artistic licence remain my own.

  As ever, I am endlessly grateful to Victoria Hobbs at A.M. Heath, who does so much more than I ever thought an agent would. It’s been a very happy experience to work with Alexandra Pringle, Helen Garnons-Williams and Erica Jarnes at Bloomsbury, and with Audrey Cotterell, the copy-editor.

  The manuscript was given a thorough cleansing, battering and revivifying by my writing friends, Pamela Johnson, Cheryl Moskowitz, Mary Hamer, Mavis Gregson, Carol DeVaughn, Geraldine Paine, Annabel Chown, Paola de Carolis, Ann Vaughan-Williams, Sarah Salway, Jane Kirwan, Sue Ehrhardt, Jill Foulston, Patricia Guy, Carole Satyamurti and Louise Berridge.

  As ever, I am grateful to the staff at the British Library, London Library and most particularly the Library at the Wellcome Collection.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPES

  The text for this book is set in the following types:

  Perpetua is an adaptation of a style of letter that had been popularized for monumental work in stone by Eric Gill. Large scale drawings by Gill were given to Charles Malin, a Parisian punch-cutter, and his hand cut punches were the basis for the font issued by Monotype. First used in a private translation called The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, the italic was originally called Felicity.

  Guardi was designed by Reinhard Haus of Linotype in 1987. It was named after the Guardi brothers, Gianantonio and Francesco, the last famous artists from the Renaissance Venetian school of painting. It is based on the Venetian text styles of the fifteenth century. The influence of characters originally written with a feather can be seen in many aspects of this modern alphabet.

  Caxton was designed by Leslie Usherwood in 1981. Caxton is an Old Style design with small serifs, and short ascenders and descenders.

  Berling roman is a modern face designed by K. E. Forsberg between 1951 and 1958. In spite of its youth it does carry the characteristics of an old face. The serifs are inclined and blunt, and the g has a straight ear.

  Bell was designed in 1788 by Richard Austin while working in John Bell’s British Type Foundry. Bell, impressed by the clarity and contrast found in contemporary French typefaces cut by Firmin Didot, wanted his foundry to offer a British version. Austin, a skilful punchcutter who first trained as an engraver, produced a sharply serifed face, like Didot in its contrast of thick and thin strokes, but more like Baskerville in its use of bracketed, less rectilinear, serifs. Stanley Morison later described the face as the first English modern typeface.

  Bembo was first used in 1495 by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius for Cardinal Bembo’s De Aetna, and was cut for Manutius by Francesco Griffo. It was one of the types used by Claude Garamond (1480–1561) as a model for his Romain de L’Universitë, and so it was the forerunner of what became standard European type for the following two centuries. Its modern form follows the original types and was designed for Monotype in 1929.