There is a book in Harvard’s library that you do not simply read. For nearly a century, you could hold it in your hands and, in a literal sense, hold part of another person as well.
The volume was a nineteenth-century French book called Des destinées de l’âme, or The Destinies of the Soul, written by novelist Arsène Houssaye in 1879. Its subject was the soul, death, and what might await human beings after life. But the book’s most unsettling feature was not its contents. It was the material covering its boards: human skin.
The practice has a technical name: anthropodermic bibliopegy. Although it sounds like something invented for a Gothic novel, it was real. A small number of books from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries were bound, in whole or in part, with human skin. The practice appears to have been especially associated with medical men, collectors, and the culture of anatomical study that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe and America.
That does not mean every book rumored to have a human-skin binding is genuine. For centuries, animal leather and human skin could look remarkably similar once prepared and dyed. Modern testing has been necessary to separate fact from library legend. In 2014, scientists used a technique called peptide mass fingerprinting to confirm that the Harvard book’s binding was human—not calfskin, goatskin, or an elaborate hoax.
The story became darker when researchers examined the book’s history.
The first known owner was Ludovic Bouland, a French physician and bibliophile who had received the book from Houssaye. A handwritten note inside the volume explained why Bouland had chosen such an extraordinary binding. In translation, he wrote: “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.”
He also stated that he had taken the skin from the back of a deceased woman. She had been a patient at a psychiatric hospital where Bouland worked, and Harvard later concluded that the skin had been removed without her consent. Her name is unknown.
That detail changes the character of the object. Without it, the book might be treated as an eerie example of Victorian eccentricity, a macabre curiosity tucked away among rare volumes. With it, the book becomes evidence of something more disturbing: the power doctors and institutions once exercised over the bodies of people who had little ability to resist them, even in death.
Other Cases of Books Bound in Human Skin
The Harvard volume was not the only book associated with Bouland. Another, a seventeenth-century medical work concerning virginity, was also bound in human skin. Other confirmed examples include medical texts, anatomical works, books about notorious crimes, and even a copy of a criminal’s memoir bound in the criminal’s own skin.
That last case is unusual because the man reportedly requested it. James Allen, a Massachusetts highwayman who died in 1837, asked for his skin to be used to bind copies of his life story. One copy eventually entered the Boston Athenaeum. In that instance, the binding was supposedly part of the author’s wishes. In many other cases, however, the person whose skin was used was never consulted—or was not in a position to give meaningful consent.
The most famous examples often involve executed criminals. In England, the skin of William Corder, hanged for the celebrated Red Barn murder in 1828, was reportedly tanned and used to cover books about his crime. Such bindings transformed a body into a souvenir, a warning, or a trophy. The book did not merely describe the dead person’s story. It carried a piece of him on its cover.
This is part of what makes anthropodermic books so disturbing. They collapse the distance between reader and subject. A conventional book tells us about a body, a crime, a disease, or a death. A book bound in skin seems to bring the body itself into the room. It turns reading into an act of physical contact, even when the reader knows nothing about the person whose remains are being touched.
For years, Harvard treated its notorious volume partly as a curiosity. Library lore held that students were once hazed by being sent to retrieve it from the stacks without being told what they were carrying. When the human-skin binding was confirmed in 2014, Harvard’s public discussion reportedly adopted a sensationalistic and humorous tone. The university later acknowledged that this treatment had objectified the unknown woman at the center of the story.
The Human Skin Binding Finally Removed
In March 2024, Harvard removed the human-skin binding from the book. The university cited the ethically fraught circumstances of its creation and subsequent history. The original book remains available for research, both in person and digitally, but the skin itself has been placed in secure storage while Harvard researches the woman’s identity and consults with authorities about a respectful final disposition. Images of the binding were also removed from Harvard’s online platforms.
The decision does not erase the history of the object. If anything, it makes the history harder to dismiss as a piece of Gothic entertainment. These books are fascinating because they are real—but they are also records of older attitudes toward medicine, punishment, mental illness, poverty, and human remains.
The horror is not only that a book was bound in skin, but that someone looked at a dead woman and saw material. Then, for generations, other people looked at the resulting book and saw a curiosity before they saw a person.