Harvard removes human skin binding from 145-year-old book

The Harvard University Library announced last month that they had finally removed a binding – made with human skin – from a 145-year-old book which they acquired 90 years ago.

A 2014 report first found that the binding on their copy of the 19th-century book Des Destinées de l’Ame was made from the skin of an unknown deceased woman who was interned as a patient at a French psychiatric hospital.

They revealed that the first owner of the book – named Ludovic Bouland – had taken skin from the body of a woman who had died at the psychiatric hospital where he worked.

Dr. Bouland was quoted as telling the book’s author Arsene Houssaye, “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.”

Binding books in human skin was once reported as a common practice, called anthropodermic bibliopegy. A 2022 report identified over 20,000 human remains in the university’s collections, including skeletons, teeth, hair, and bone fragments. That year’s report recommended removing the human skin binding from Des Destinées de l’Ame.

A decade after their 2014 report, an official Harvard statement retracted the university’s previous enthusiasm over the book-binding method.

Harvard noted its “past failures in its stewardship of the book that further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being whose remains were used for its binding”, and announced that representatives were contacting French authorities “to determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains”.

First published in 1879, Des Destinées de l’Ame – which translates to Destinies of the Soul – is considered as “a meditation on the soul and life after death”, according to Harvard Associate University Librarian for Archives and Special Collections Tom Hyry.