Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

Abstract

In Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, author Megan Rosenbloom introduces readers to the world of anthropodermic bibliopegy, the practice of binding books with human skin. Rosenbloom is a former medical librarian and journalist, now working as the Collection Strategies Librarian at UCLA. She is also the co-founder of the Death Salon, the events branch of the Order of the Good Death, a community that helped popularize and now leads the growing international death-positive movement. The Death Salon, a collective that hosts informal events relating to the discussion of death and mourning, as well as Rosenbloom herself are big proponents of the death-positive movement. The movement promotes death acceptance, healthy discussion of mortality, and progressive funeral practices such as green burials.In addition to Rosenbloom’s work with the Death Salon and UCLA Library, she is also a co-founder of the Anthropodermic Book Project, where she travels the world researching the provenance and collecting samples of rumored anthropodermic books. Scientists on her team use a test called peptide mass fingerprinting to either confirm or dispute if the book is anthropodermic. Anthropodermic bibliopegy mostly occurred during the nineteenth century when there were rapid advancements in medical treatment and research. Doctors used the skin of cadavers to bind copies of books from their personal collections, usually without the donor’s consent—and sometimes even robbed from a nearby graveyard. Occasionally, the skin of executed criminals was used as an extra form of punishment.Discarded skin from patients in hospitals was abundant and easily accessible during this era. Unlike in the present day, there were no laws, medical ethics, or rules about harvesting materials from bodies after death, and doctors would use this abundance of skin to bind books from their private collections with the intention of increasing the book’s value. A book bound in human skin is particularly fetching in the rare book marketplace—even in the present day. Many of these titles do not contain valuable information, but rather out-of-date research, the only interesting point of value being its rumored binding. Descendants of Dr. Joseph Leidy referred to his anthropodermic title An Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy as “a most cherished possession” (4) when donating it to a museum collection, not because of the content, but because of its unique binding.There are a multitude of ethical concerns surrounding the practice and study of anthropodermic bibliopegy, and Rosenbloom quickly acknowledges them as she articulates her thesis about the field. Books bound in human skin, as unsettling and polarizing as they are, should be studied to shed light on the complicated history of the medical profession and greater society during the nineteenth century, particularly in its treatment of women, BIPOC, the disadvantaged, and criminals. Furthermore, Rosenbloom encourages the medical profession to grapple with the practice of their historical “cold clinical gaze” when conducting groundbreaking medical research and development, which often occurred at the expense of the disenfranchised.Rosenbloom successfully advocates for the study and testing of books bound in human skin by highlighting her interdisciplinary research and testing process for each rumored title and the historical insight she gains along the way. She takes great effort to remain as objective as possible and avoid getting lost in the infamous reputation of supposed anthropodermic items. Her effort is apparent early on in the author’s note where she includes a single photo of a confirmed anthropodermic book she deems the most “beautiful and artfully bound” and announces she will not include any other photos (ix). Her writing style is approachable and engaging for readers. When encountering tattooed human-skin flakes in a special collections folder at Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, she communicates a universal feeling of disgust with a simple declaration of “that was gross, even for me” (24). Even though Rosenbloom has a passion for these books, she understands that they provoke visceral reactions for many, and in this honesty, readers bond with her.Rosenbloom’s recounts of evaluating a rumored anthropodermic book’s provenance is one of a detective obsessed with their case, meticulous piecing together clues to shed light on the book’s history and the nameless individuals used to create them. Using primary and secondary sources, Rosebloom brings these cadavers to the forefront, trying her best to make sure their story is told and honored. Examining correspondence, museum acquisition registers, hospital records, and doctor reports, as well as conducting interviews with experts; such as a gruesome visit to one of the only still-operational businesses practicing traditional tanning in the United States, takes the reader on an a truly fascinating interdisciplinary research ride. In this investigation we are immersed in the lives of the individuals who created these items, the lives of the dead used for binding materials, and even the grotesque items themselves. Follicle patterns on covers and the addition of notes or markings in the text after creation are particularly helpful in proving the rumored anthropodermic title false.Her chapter on research and testing rumored anthropodermic items from Nazi Germany is particularly compelling. She highlights not only the cultural loss, lives gone, and atrocities against victims from the Holocaust, but also the detailed examination of rumored anthropodermic objects themselves as clues to help determine their origins. She ends the chapter on a poignant insight that the Nazis themselves created the medical ethics that they were then tried by during the Nuremberg trials, which eventually became the Nuremberg Code. A nod to the bigger picture anthropodermic bibliopegy is a part of in history.Many of the other investigations in Dark Archives are set among the backdrop of infamous points of history such as the Antebellum South, Civil War, the French Revolution, and England in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. It is in these uncomfortable moments where readers must confront and reckon with racism, sexism, and classism as a possible motivation for the practice of anthropodermic bibliopegy, in addition to the problematic nature of the practice itself. Rosenbloom spares no pleasantries and acknowledges how potentially horrifying the test results for these titles could be in the study of history if they are proven true. Rosenbloom walks a fine line of providing evidence-based research and navigating problematic historical periods to give the reader a well-presented snapshot of where anthropodermic bibliopegy sits historically, which is in an extremely complicated place.Chapter 6, “The Long Shadow of the Night Doctors,” takes the reader on an investigation of several rumored titles said to consist of famous Black historical figures. The first individual was enslaved Crispus Attucks, who was part Native American as well as Black. Attucks’s murder (the rumored first of the Boston Massacre) is said to be the beginning of the American Revolution. The second individual is enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley who gained freedom and success after a move to England right before the American Revolution. After an extensive investigation, these titles failed the PMF test and were not anthropodermic, but rather elaborately doctored and victims of vicious rumors started by those who were looking to profit from the suffering of enslaved people. While there are no current confirmed occurrences of anthropodermic titles created by white doctors using the skin of BIPOC individuals, Rosenbloom concludes the chapter elaborating on the historically abusive relationship Black Americans experienced with the medical profession and reiterates that just because it has not been confirmed yet does not mean that the practice did not occur. She fully recognizes the close relationship this practice has with problematic behavior by doctors during this era.This is a trend throughout the work. Rosenbloom uses her exploration of anthropodermic bibliopegy to also highlight the problematic history of behavior toward the disenfranchised in the United States as well as Europe. While examining such a gruesome practice in itself, she ties the atrocities of different periods of history, and the price poor, female, BIPOC people paid in the advancement of modern medicine. She consistently reminds the reader that because there were no laws relating to handling the dead, or medical ethics which doctors abided by, this practice was able to perpetuate in the shadow of the advancement of modern medicine. These doctors were the pioneers of many of the practices that save lives today, but instead of turning a blind eye to their practices Rosenbloom urges us to confront the price disenfranchised individuals throughout history paid for medicine to advance to its modern-day heights.Rosenbloom does not shy away from reminding readers of turn-of-the-century doctor’s unethical role in the practice of anthropodermic bibliopegy as well as what it means to collect and house these titles in the present day. To collect and study these books means that individuals exist in a constant state of intrigue, fascination, and repulsion. She articulates this unique relationship while testing a copy of Poe’s The Gold Bug. While she herself would not own one personally, she would care for one if her institution found an anthropodermic title in their collection. “As Vatinel alluded in his notes to me, our relationships with anthropodermic books are ‘complicated’” (205).The housing of anthropodermic books is a polarizing issue for libraries, museums, and special collections. This clash of ideologies is on full display during a conversation with Princeton librarian Paul Needham who attributes a specific anthropodermic book’s creation in Harvard’s collection to “a post mortem rape” (86). Rosenbloom and Needham cannot sway each other’s points of view and this unresolved argument highlights a weakness of the text. When the opposing side considers these books as violated human beings, little can be done to convince them that anthropodermic titles should be housed in collections. For individuals whose beliefs lie alongside Needham, Rosenbloom’s attempts to present objective research on the benefits of studying and curating anthropodermic books appear insensitive, thus potentially alienating some readers.While her meticulous objectivity and fascination could be interpreted as insensitive and inappropriate for some, it is quite the opposite for others. As a strong proponent of the death-positive movement, Rosenbloom values confronting fears and taboo views of death and mortality as a whole. The subject matter of Dark Archives is no exception. Her place within the death-positive movement informs the inquisitive, uninhibited, and unapologetic exploration of anthropodermic bibliopegy. In the final chapters of the book Rosenbloom encourages readers to think about their own mortality and legacy through the detailed exploration of options for her own corpse once she passes away. Rosenbloom truly lives her passion in her career and it is one of the strengths of examining such provocative subject matter.Studying and testing anthropodermic books is a new practice and Dark Archives is one of the first comprehensive books published on the subject. However, there are several titles exploring its major topics. Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) explores how medical innovation in the nineteenth century was the result of detached, cruel, and often nonconsensual treatment of patients, a major topic explored in the thesis of Dark Archives. Author Caitlin Doughty explores subject matter surrounding the death-positive movement that Rosenbloom champions in the final chapters. Doughty is a mortician and the founder of the Good Death and co-founder of the Death Salon, alongside Rosenbloom. Doughty chronicles her experiences in the funeral industry and promoting the death-positive movement in several of her titles such as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (W. W. Norton, 2014). Readers curious to explore more ideas such as donating their body to medical research will delight in Doughty’s work.Dark Archives is a comprehensive introduction to anthropodermic bibliopegy and extremely useful to librarians, humanities faculty, museum curators, archivists, and specifically medical historians and librarians. Through interdisciplinary research, Rosenbloom educates and encourages readers to consider these titles’ role in history, library collections, and education around the world. Dark Archives is unique, provocative, and powerful, prompting readers to not only grapple with modern medicine's history, but also their own views about death and the ethics of medical research. While the study of anthropodermic bibliopegy is new and attracts an interest from a wider demographic of readers, Rosenbloom’s strong scholarship methods presented in Dark Archives is on par with other more established related subject areas in academia. Researchers looking to examine a strong, engaging, and honest exploration of a new complex topic often set against the backdrops of heavily studied periods of Western history will take much away from this work.