The Boston Athenæum is one of America’s oldest independent libraries, with a collection of hundreds of thousands of volumes. Only one book, however, is bound in the author’s own skin:
[Photo courtesy of P. Kafasis]
This infamous volume is “Narrative of the Life of James Allen”, who was a 19th-century criminal. One of Allen’s many aliases was “George Walton”, which is why the front cover reads, in Latin, “This book is bound in the skin of Walton”. Yuck.
The Athenæum explains the book thusly:
“While sick with the tuberculosis that would soon kill him, James Allen requested that a copy of his memoir be bound in his own skin and given to John Fenno Jr., the one man who had successfully resisted when Allen attempted to rob him at gun-point in 1834.”
That’s pretty grotesque, but hey, it’s apparently what Allen wanted.1 You have to respect a dying person’s wishes.2
Across the Charles over at Harvard, however, the origins of a similarly-bound book are rather more distressing. There, a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “On the Destiny of the Soul” was, until very recently, bound in the skin of the body of an unknown psychiatric patient who almost certainly made no similar request for the disposition of her remains.
After many years, the Harvard Library is working to make things right:
“The Library is now in the process of conducting additional provenance and biographical research into the book, Bouland, and the anonymous female patient, as well as consulting with appropriate authorities at the University and in France to determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains,” the statement said.
The announcement follows a decade-long effort from rare book experts Paul Needham and John Lancaster calling on Harvard to remove the book from its holdings and repatriate the remains to France.
I imagine that last year’s news of misappropriated human remains at the Harvard Medical School morgue spurred this process along.
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