There is a book at Harvard called Des destinées de l’âme.
Destinies of the Soul.
Arsène Houssaye wrote it. He did not bind it in human skin.
That sounds like an irrelevant disclaimer until you understand that the man who did bind it was not its author. Ludovic Bouland, a French physician, acquired the book after it had been published and decided that it required a more meaningful cover.
A book about the human soul, he believed, deserved a human covering.
The skin came from a dead woman who had reportedly been a patient in a French psychiatric hospital. Her name was not preserved.
Bouland’s was.
He left a note explaining what he had done. His reasoning remained with the book, carefully recorded and repeatedly quoted. Her skin remained there too, stretched around someone else’s words as evidence of his cleverness.
His explanation became part of the book’s history.
Her body became part of its construction.
Bouland did not write the book. He did not know the woman. Yet he appointed himself interpreter of both. He decided what Houssaye’s work should become, what the woman’s body should mean, and how one could be used to complete the other.
I do not know what Houssaye would have thought of the binding. Perhaps he would have been fascinated. Perhaps appalled. Perhaps he would have objected to another man altering his work and turning a meditation on the soul into a medical curiosity.
We do not know because Bouland chose for him too.
The violations are not equal. A book is not a body. Changing an author’s binding is not the same as stealing a woman’s skin. But both acts were born from the same extraordinary entitlement: I understand what this should become, and therefore I have the right to make it so.
There is a name for books bound in human skin: anthropodermic bibliopegy.
There is always a beautiful word available when educated men need to make an ugly thing sound scholarly.
Stories about such books have circulated for centuries. Many belong more to folklore than history. Scientific testing has revealed that some supposedly human bindings were actually made from sheep, goat, cow, or pig.
But some of the stories are true.
In 1821, eighteen-year-old John Horwood was executed in Bristol. After his death, surgeon Richard Smith publicly dissected him, had part of his skin tanned, and used it to bind a collection of papers concerning Horwood’s alleged crime, trial, execution, and dissection.
They assembled a book about what happened to him.
Then they made him the cover.
The binding was decorated with a gallows, skulls, and crossbones. Across it were stamped the Latin words Cutis Vera Johannis Horwood:
The true skin of John Horwood.
William Burke received a similar ending.
Burke and William Hare murdered vulnerable people and sold their bodies to an anatomist in Edinburgh. After Burke was convicted and executed in 1829, his own body was publicly dissected. Objects made from his skin began appearing afterward. A pocketbook bearing his name remains in the collection of Surgeons’ Hall Museums.
The man who sold bodies became a body divided into souvenirs.
There is an undeniable symmetry to it, but symmetry is not justice.
Burke became more famous. His skin became an artifact. His name remained attached to the object. The people he helped murder are still routinely compressed into a number.
We remember the killers as Burke and Hare.
How many of their victims can most people name?
The pocketbook, the execution, the dissection, the skin—every grotesque detail draws our attention back toward the murderer. Spectacle has always known how to make a man more interesting than the people he harmed.
Then there is James Allen.
Allen was an American highwayman who dictated the story of his life from prison. According to the history accompanying the book, he asked that a copy of his deathbed confession be bound in his own skin and presented to John Fenno, a man who had resisted one of his attempted robberies.
His wish was reportedly carried out. The cover bears a Latin inscription declaring that the book was bound in the skin of Walton, one of Allen’s aliases.
It is grotesque. It is strange. It is also not the same story.
The unnamed woman became Bouland’s metaphor. Horwood’s body became an extension of his punishment. Burke’s became spectacle and souvenir.
Allen, however strangely, appears to have chosen.
That distinction is everything.
I do not care very much what happens to my body after I die. Burn it. Bury it beneath a tree. Donate whatever remains useful. If becoming part of a book were presented as an option, I might even be interested.
But I would choose the book.
I would choose the words. I would decide whose hands might hold it and what story my body would be made to tell. Perhaps I would choose something I had written. Perhaps I would choose a book that had made me.
I would have three words stamped inside the cover:
She agreed to this.
Those words would separate an eccentric final wish from a theft.
The horror is not simply that human skin became leather. We do things to the dead every day that would be unthinkable to do to the living. We burn them, drain them, cut them open, remove their organs, bury them in sealed boxes, or reduce them to fragments and scatter them into the sea.
What matters is who decided.
A person may choose to donate her organs, give her body to science, become ash, become soil, or—if she is exceptionally committed to a theme—become a book.
What she cannot do is object after someone else has chosen for her. The dead cannot withdraw consent. They cannot correct the story being told about them. They cannot demand that their bodies be returned or insist that someone else’s interpretation is not the meaning they intended.
The woman Bouland used had been institutionalized. That matters.
Certain bodies have always been easier to acquire: the poor, the imprisoned, the executed, the institutionalized, the unidentified. People separated from anyone with enough power to insist that their bodies still belonged to them.
History calls them unclaimed, as though a person becomes available when no one important arrives to object.
Bouland did not conceal what he had done. He wrote it down because he expected his explanation to make the book more interesting.
Apparently, it did.
The volume passed from one respectable owner to another. It became a collectible, then a library holding, then a curiosity people requested permission to touch.
A respectable chain of custody is still a chain.
The woman moved through it as patient, corpse, material, binding, artifact, and headline. At every stage, someone else decided what she was.
In 2014, scientists confirmed that the binding was human. Harvard announced the discovery in a tone the library later acknowledged was sensational and morbid. The news traveled around the world.
The book became more famous.
The woman did not become more known.
People wanted to see the cover, touch it, and say they had held a book bound in human skin. Even the language kept the book at the center of the sentence.
The woman remained the material.
In March 2024, Harvard removed the binding, acknowledged that its treatment of the volume had continued the woman’s objectification, and began further research into who she had been.
The book remains. The physician remains in the historical record. The author remains on the title page.
The woman is still being searched for.
Bouland believed a book about the soul required a body. He never seems to have considered that the body already belonged to someone.
His note survived because his thoughts were considered essential to the object’s meaning. Her name disappeared because no one considered her meaning essential at all.
The book kept its title. The author kept his name. The doctor kept his explanation. The collectors kept their provenance. The library kept its catalogue.
She became the part everyone touched and no one knew.
These are not books bound in human skin.
They are people bound to books.