Anthropodermic Books Were Made from Human Skin

If you can read Latin, you might want to stop right here and scroll away. If you don’t know Latin, here’s the sentence to stop if you are squeamish, before I tell you what it says.

Ready? “Hic liber Waltonus cute compactus est This book was bound in Walton’s skin.” As the discipline of Peptide Mass Fingerprinting (PMF) shows, this was not balderdash. The book is actually called _The Highwayman’s Narrative_ and tells the story of the bandit James Allen, aka George Walton, who was eventually captured and imprisoned. Apparently he reformed his ways at the end and requested that two copies of his confession be printed and bound into volumes made of his own skin.

And his is not the only “anthropodermic books,” as human-skinned book covers are called. To date, there are 18 confirmed such volumes. The PMF testing has disproven claims of 14 others, but that only accounts for 32 of the 49 rumoured cases. The bulk of these come from the 19th century and were done by physicians, but earlier cases certainly exist, such as the 1600s case of Father Henry Garnet. Garnet was involved in hearing the confessions of British men involved with the Gunpowder Plot, and was executed for failing to report the crimes. The book made up of his skin has an image of Garnet’s face on the cover.

And why, you may ask, did folks decide to cover books made out of human leather? The answers vary: as punishment for crimes, as curiosity objects, because the future book-covers had requested before death, and because medical doctors of the 19th century were thanking the patients they had learned from. It’s not quite the same thing as the death memorials of loved ones that can be seen on the back of some modern mourners’ vehicles, though, is it?