Anthropodermic Bibliopegy is the process of binding a book in human skin. Today we talk the history, and notable examples of this ghoulish practice.
Sources:
"Thunder, Very Close, Rain, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org
The Madman's Library
KISS Blood
Saddam's book club
Anthropodermic book science
Anthropodermic bibliography
Narrative of the life of James Allen, alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the highwayman : being his death-bed confession, to the warden of the Massachusetts state prison
Fate of the blenden hall
Loose Transcript:
Hi everyone, welcome to another fabulous episode of nightmare now! The show where we brave brutal books and bring out blasphemous bloody business for breaking up a banal bus ride or business meeting.
Hope everyone is having a great week, mine’s chaotic but at least I don’t have polio. My laptop switched the microphone part way through the original recording so I went to edit and half of it sounded like I was screaming like a lunatic into walkie talkie in a tunnel, the other half sounded all messed up because I was using the wrong microphone. The audio is beyond my capabilities to repair without summoning some kind of audio demon so here we are talking about a cursed media. Again.
Work is still crazy and gets crazier by the day so I think for now I am going to move release days to thursday mornings starting next week, I hope to eventually get the research synthesis turnaround a lot faster as I streamline the workflow but for now I think doing the show on weeknights is gonna help with consistency and my sanity a lot more than procrastinating with the homies on the weekend and then trying to outline, record, edit and promote monday night till 3am. So keep an eye out next Thursday for next week's show.
I think that’s more than enough housekeeping stuff for now so let's just dive right into it, Today we’re talking about a crazy little thing called anthropodermic bibliopegy If you’re up on your latin or history you may be able to figure out what that means, but if you’re not it’s the lovely art of bookbinding… with human skin. A practice with a wide reaching and surprising history. My main source today is the lovely coffee table book I received as a gift, from myself, The Madman’s Library, by Edward Brooke Hitching.
Luckily, or unluckily depending on who you ask the madman's library is just bound in regular old paper, whatever cardboard paste stuff they use to bind modern books. It’s really cool, basically hitching was the son of an antique book collector and from a very early age fell in love with books, especially rare, unusual and unique books. Within its pages he collects and references hundreds of such books including ancient religious texts, giant dusty codices, bestiaries, grimoires and more, you could do a whole podcast on weird books alone, so we’ll definitely be coming back to this one. One chapter in particular I want to highlight in our first foray into literary curiosities is the one entitled “Books made of Flesh and Blood” which immediately caught my eye.
It starts off innocuous enough, with traditional books bound in cowhide or rabbit fur or snakeskin, things like that, that were common practice since the dawn of book binding. From barely worked tanned hide to elaborate, ornate skin designs, there’s a whole spectrum, but specifically we’re looking at books bound in human skin but we we wouldn’t be covering it on the show if I, I mean you the disturbed listener didn’t want lovely Literally “hand” crafted journal, like made by hands from hands. Perhaps a tasteful nipple skin latch to keep your embarrassing thoughts about your crush truly secret from prying eyes. Ed Gein would probably have a couple of these laying around if he could read.
So what would possess somebody to do this exactly? Well for one thing, it’s a hell of a conversation piece. And it sends a hell of a message to boot. Oftentimes a book bound in human skin was a list of misdeeds of an executed criminal. It was sort of a punishment beyond death for the convicted and it saved a goat or cow, isn’t that nice.
You had the accounts of murderers crimes bound in the murderers own flesh which is metal as f**k and probably houses some insanely bad juju. It wasn’t just murderers though, for example you had traitors getting the same treatment. Most of the time after death. Speaking of treatments that’s a good segue. How do you take human skin and make it suitable to cover your fifth grade textbooks? Apparently there were 2 main ways of getting the skin ready. That’s of course after you have the skin of the person. I can’t get into the pretreatment because, well, there’s more than one way to skin a person… If I reveal how many I know I feel like I’ll get some calls from the FBI. Anyway, once you have the skin, hopefully humanely sourced. You could soak it in lime water, take off the hair and chunks and goop afterwards, and just go to town with tannin compounds to tan the hide. The alternative is just to go the foul bachelor frog route and blast it with piss. A surprisingly versatile tool any problem solver needs in their metaphorical toolbox.
The ammonia dissolves the fidddly chunks and pubes and guts and gets it ready for stretching and drying. And if you’re feeling real fancy, and you want a nice sheen and luster on the cover of your new skin book, all you had to do was give it a rubdown with a nice rustic stain varnish cocktail made by mixing dog dookie, bird poop and water. I mean if you’re gonna do it, do it right I guess.
There’s some great stories in here about notable examples of these books and the people that made them, and also the people they’re made out of. The first one actually goes back to a previous episode, the one on Robert Liston, so check that one out for more info, alternatively, if you’ve got a time machine skip ahead a few months till when we do a deeper dive on burke and hare, resurrection men, and the body snatcher arms races.
But the short version was that william burke and william hare were a pair of scumbag murderers, with a get rich quick scheme that was basically just cutting the natural death middle man out of the cadaver trade, murdering victims and selling the bodies for medical research, but when they were caught, partially thanks to our boy liston, TIME ME GENTLEMEN! Again check that one out! Hare I believe got some kind of squealer plea immunity deal or something to sell out Burke and get out of the hangman’s noose himself. Naturally Burke wasn’t so lucky. He was hanged for his crimes on january 28th 1829 and then immediately dissected and flayed. A fitting end for his crime spree of selling bodies for dissection. I don’t remember that part of alanis morissete’s ironic.
They took the newly flayed skin and turned part of it into a wallet for the prison guard that kept an eye on him and they took more of the skin to put a complete document of the trial and evidence of his case in writing into a neat little skin book that currently resides in the surgeon’s college in edinburgh along with his skeleton. They really used all the parts of this dude.
This practice continued pretty much until it fell out of vogue in the late 1800s, it wasn’t really as popular to be skinning and tanning human hide anymore, at least not outside of texas that is. There was one other notable criminal skin book that a friend mentioned to me when I brought this topic up. Thanks Gabe! He called my attention to a book currently housed in the boston athenaeum (a thuh nee um) called the Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison. They really didn’t care much for brevity back then, side note theres also a great chapter on weird book titles in the madman’s library that make that one look like a haiku. So james allen, aka jonas pierce, aka the highwayman ect ect was a highwayman. I guess that much is obvious but whatever. He was in the state prison in Massachusetts and his health was failing, he wasn’t on death row or anything, just kind of old and sick and in jail. He knew he was on the way out and wrote down his death bed confession but here’s where it gets weird. His last wish was that when he died, they use his skin to pind two copies of his f**king confession and memoirs.
One would go to his prison doctor that was taking care of him at the end of his life and the other copy went to a John A. Fenno Jr. The story with him was that James Allen, being a highwayman, or maybe just a big johnny cash fan, tried to rob this guy at gunpoint years ago before he was in prison, and john was the only guy he robbed that ever fought back or resisted and James Allen found a weird admiration for that courage later in his life. The highwayman, James, actually shot the other guy John, but the bullet richotected off his suspender buckle or something and he survived. James Allen was so moved by this display of bravery in the face of certain death at his hands that when he died he had the other copy of his skin bound confession presented to John Fenno Jr.
You gotta imagine waking up to get the mail back in the day walking out in your f**king bunny slippers and the post man stops by and is just like taop of the mornin to ye mr fenno, I gots me a parcel for ya from the state prison” you cautiously unwrap the sring on the package, hands trembling and it’s just the memoirs of the guy that tried to murder you bound in his own skin with a little note that just says, “ you got scrote and I like the cut of your gib laddy” like what do you even do?
Th..thanks I guess and put it up on the shelf. Full disclosure I don’t actually know what’s in the book but I found an internet archive link to the full book if you want to know more, I’ll throw that into the show notes at nightmarenow.com. Let me know if there’s anything cool in there it’s only like 40 pages or so. Later on fenno’s daughter donated the book to the athenaeum after her father died and it has remained there ever since.
This case has been pretty well documented and even was proven to be genuine man leather by an organization called the Anthropodermic Book Project. They were another cool source for this episode because these are the guys that test all these books via peptide mass fingerprinting. This is a process where they take a tiny sample of the book digest it with enzymes and run the resulting digestate through a mass spec machine to compare the spectra of the peptides in the collagen in the skin from known values for mammals like goats, cows, deer and humans. For the non-lab science inclined they basically turn a piece of the skin into juice and run the juice through a machine that says what animal it is. Think karen from spongebob dissolving seaweed to find out it’s 50% sea and 50% weed. Kinda like the turtle from finding nemo.
One book was about pituitary issues causing gigantism or other hormonal abnormalities, and that was bound in the skin of a literal giant from a ringling bros circus standing eight foot six. There’s not a whole lot of detail available on that particular case but at least it’s on theme right?
Like I said the whole human skin books industry started to collapse in the late eighteen hundreds but there are a few exceptions, this one’s apocryphal but apparently some lady had a book binder wrap up their love letters in her dead husband. That was in f**king 1958! Again not a whole lot of detail on that one but there’s at least an implied consent there.
The earliest form of the practice is, of course, a bible. Dating back to at least the 1200s bound in the skin of a young woman. And I’ve seen enough criminal minds to know that this s**t probably still continues here and there to this very day.
Another semi famous, yet non criminal case was of a huge, anonymous fan of camille flamarrion. A french author focusing on astronomy. Camille commented on how soft and smooth this gal’s skin was and she was super into it. A real i f**king love science type broad. This is your typical nasa t shirt wearing neil degrasse tyson groupie type. That reminds me I need to send him a mean tweet for talking s**t about UFOs the other day. Anyway, this chick was pale and glamorous mostly because she had tuberculosis. Anyway she was about to kick the bucket from the consumption and her last wish was to HAVE HER SKIN DONATED TO HER FAVORITE SCIENTIST PERSONALITY. To be turned into his next masterwork.
I guess there wasn’t a whole lot of paperwork or government oversight in 1882 france, because and this is a direct quote. “In accordance with her wishes, her skin was taken by the celebrated Paris physician Dr Ravaud, who delivered the roll of skin to Flammarion’s residence himself. He told Flammarion he had flayed the ‘marvellously attractive young woman’, whose name he was forbidden from revealing, just ‘a few minutes after she passed on’.” unquote.
After that a copy of camille’s latest space novel was bound in her skin and theres actually a picture of it in the book, it’s quite elegant.
When I eventually release a patreon or something so I can quit my job I’ll have notebooks in my own skin available to my highest tier subscribers in the event of my death. Seems like a fair tradeoff.
That kinda closes the book on notable cases of human skin books, actually there’s a copy of the french constitution bound with the skin of a revolutionary, but after that we’ve covered the flesh, but that’s only half of flesh and blood. That’s right you guys are lucking out today, because I have a whole second half of this topic. Books written in (Toccata) Human Blood…
This might be a little bit easier or harder to stomach for people based on how you feel about blood. On the one hand you’ve got the fact that people didn’t necessarily die to use their blood in a book, although I guess you could say the same for skin in modern times with skin grafts and whatever but I didn’t find any evidence of that, that’s pure speculation. But on the other hand it’s blood and that makes some people flip out. If you’re not into the blood, you probably haven’t listened this far but also now is your last warning for avoiding a whole lot of slicing, quills in fingers and really metal manuscripts.
If you gotta shut off the show, remember I’ll see you on thursday instead of tuesday because I really can’t do tuesday anymore famalam. I’m not fooling anyone saying I’m gonna be working on weekends, so it ends up me being up till three am outlining, recording and editing on monday, spreading those out over a few weekdays will lead to a much healthier mental state and workflow for me. Worst case you can delay listening and play it tuesday morning. I’ve spoken with a few listeners and it doesn’t seem like this will be an issue. I’m also gonna take this week to pull together the facebook page because I’ve got family and friends asking for it. Thursdays at seven it is! I love you all!
If you can stomach the blood let's get to in the second part of the show, what good are books bound with flesh if they don’t have blood running through their inky veins? We’re talking books written in human blood.
Now depending on how you feel about blood the books written in blood are generally less brutal than the ones bound in flesh. Based simply on the fact that getting blood is a lot easier on a person than getting their skin. It’s much less damaging to prick your own finger and write in blood than it is to have your back flayed. You’re much more likely to survive the former.
What you find in blood writing pretty often is monks, are monks? That’s a weird grammar thing. We’ll go with is, what you find is a lot of monks. Monks gonna do monk things, so a lot of times they would copy manuscripts in their own blood as a form of piety. They would slice their fingertips, make little cuts on their chest or ugh slice under the tongue. Didn’t they do that on jackass? That seems really f**king painful, not skinned painful but definitely unpleasant. It seems like the lighter the blood appeared on the page the more pure of heart the writer was so that’s a neat little metric to test yourself with.
And test themselves they did, draining blood from their fingers just to get another page done, there’s some great pictures of these you can find online that you can see where on the page the coagulants in the blood actually started to clot on the page and then trail off and become lighter until the next prick to get more blood ink. It’s really f**king cool in my opinion, interestingly some of the text that is copied in these blood manuscripts describes a pious buddha ripping off his own skin for paper, using his own blood for ink and snapping a finger bone for a quill. Like bro chill! I’ll drive you to staples!
Aside from monk manuscripts, of which, theres a lot of them, there's a few more crazy examples I want to get through. One of the most interesting is Saddam’s Hussein's blood Qur’an. This is absolutely the most notable recent addition to the flesh and blood books. In 1997, Saddam Hussein as a nice little sixtieth birthday present to himself, commissioned, from a renowned scribe, a copy of the Qur’an written in his own blood. I guess eveyone goes through their rawr XD goth phase at different times. He said quote
“My life has been full of dangers in which I should have lost a lot of blood but since I have bled only a little, I asked somebody to write God’s words with my blood in gratitude.” unquote In a letter to the media a few years later in 2000. Reportedly he was hooked up to exsanguinate around 27 liters of blood, not all at once, to be mixed in with ink, to write out the three hundred and thirty six thousand words in the Qur’an. So after a few years this was actually achieved, whether it’s actually all his blood might be up for debate but they did produce a Qur’an written in his blood. Needless to say, Saddam’s lucky to not be losing a lot of blood line really didn’t age well. The quote “war on terror” clownfest started and we’re gonna yadda yadda yadda all that and by 2006 Saddam was executed for his war crimes. Interestingly enough, I came across in my research that in addition to all the f**ked up s**t he did as the dictator of Iraq, he still had time to write FOUR f**king novels? ROMANCE NOVELS? About a medieval Iraqi leader falling in forbidden love with a beautiful girl. Allegorical to represent the Iraqi people while he seduced her in spite of her husband, read as the USA. I guess his rawr XD phase was longer than we thought. The others were historical fiction, and one included a particularly ham fisted scene where the hero destroys two towers in the land of christians and jews. Not touching that one.
I guess he’s not exactly a role model, but it really says something about making the time for your creative pursuits even if your’e erm… busy with your job and responsibilities. What’s interesting from my admittedly limited understanding of the islamic faith, it’s blasphemy to produce a Qur’an in this manner, and another blasphemy to destroy a Qur’an no matter how it was made so the state of saddam’s blood Qur’an is in a weird catch 22 where it shouldn’t exist but nobody wants to destroy it. As far as I can tell now it’s scattered in a few vaults in Iraqi government buildings.
Phew, really hope I didn’t offend anybody there. Obligatory I love all my listeners. Now, MOVING ON.
Marvel comics did a limited run KISS comic 1977 that they mixed in a vial of all the band member’s blood into the ink in the printing factory at marvel. So that happened, a little bit more of a sensational marketing gimmick but it’s verified and worth including. That one is kind of hilarious in it’s own right without me editorializing, especially if you’re familiar with the more idiotic ways KISS has merchandized. I’ll put a link to the KISS KASKET in the show notes for the uninitiated.
Lastly we’ve got one that isn’t actually written in human blood per se, but the original copy of Fate of the Blenden Hall, was a diary written about the harrowing shipwreck ideal of the crew of the blenden hall, by its Captain Alexander Greig. The problem was that while a desk and paper washed up like it was a cartoon, there was no ink. He had to keep a record as his captain’s duties so he needed to make do with the next best thing. His 82 day account of the survivors of the wreck, including illustrations, was done entirely in penguins blood. Damn, talk about unhappy feet. Shipwrecks though, now that’s a great topic!
That’s what I got today guys, it’s good to be back! Again sorry I skipped a week but I think changing up the release is the best thing to do, it was totally arbitrary to begin with and this will give me a couple more weekdays to get s**t done instead of just doing research on the weekend and trying to do all the rest on mondays. Thank you all so much for all your support, it means the world to me and I can’t wait to keep the show going in perpetuity. For updates, show notes, memes, banter or anything else you might need, check out nightmarenow.com for links to the rest of the socials. You guys are the best, I’ll see you on thursday! I’d say sweet dreams, but we all know it’s only gonna be nightmares now!
