Bookbinding, 19th Century Style
2006-01-09

You can always depend on Boing Boing to point you to an odd story, and this one from Boston.com is most certainly no exception: Brown University's library boasts an unusual anatomy book. Tanned and polished to a smooth golden brown, its cover looks and feels no different from any other fine leather. But here's its secret: the book is bound in human skin. A number of prestigious libraries -- including Harvard University's -- have such books in their collections. While the idea of making leather from human skin seems bizarre and cruel today, it was not uncommon in centuries past, said Laura Hartman, a rare book cataloger at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland and author of a paper on the subject... (continue)