A Book Bound in Human Skin? Experts Confirm

Experts have confirmed that a rare book in Harvard's library is bound in real human skin - one of the world's few remaining examples of this practice.

The Houghton Library announced via Twitter on Wednesday that one of the books in their collection - a copy of Arsène Houssaye's Des destinées de l'ame - is actually bound in human skin, as a handwritten note found within the book claims.

"This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. 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. It is interesting to see the different aspects that change this skin according to the method of preparation to which it is subjected," the note reads, according to a translation made last year.

According to Harvard experts Bill Lane and Daniel Kirby, a lab analysis of a small sliver of the book's binding showed with near certainty that the book is indeed bound in human skin.

"The PMF from Des destinées de l'ame matched the human reference, and clearly eliminated other common parchment sources, such as sheep, cattle and goat," the investigators said in a statement.

Past books from Harvard Law School that owners have claimed were bound in human skin were often actually bound in pig or sheep skin, according to the Houghton Library Blog.

There is also a small chance that the Houghton book is really bound in ape skin, as the peptide mass fingerprint (PMF) of humans is extremely similar to great apes and gibbons. However, the book was further analyzed using Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry (LCMSMS) to determine the order of amino acids in each peptide - which is different among humans and apes.

The results establish with near certainty that the binding is made with human skin.

This is "good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike," the library blog jokes, but the bizarre binding isn't as cannibalistic as it may first seem.

The original owner of the book, Ludovic Bouland, a doctor and avid book collector, received the book about humans "bound in human" from a friend in the late 1880s. The book was covered in professionally prepared skin taken off the back of an unclaimed mental patient who had died of a stroke long before the binding.