Monday, December 28, 2020

Love The Skin You're In!

Because it could become a book someday.

Another great, and weird, book from Jenny Lawson's Fantastic Strangelings book club, Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom is about Anthropodermic Bibliopegy. In other words, books bound in human skin. I'll admit to dropping all other books to read this one when it arrived based on the cover alone. 

Rosenbloom is a librarian, a journalist, and death positive which makes her quest at finding and proving out human skin bound books all the more intriguing. Obviously, your mileage will vary with this but I didn't find it disturbing or gross, so try not to let that be a deterrent to taking this book for a spin.

In the Mütter museum in Philadelphia, there is a human skin bound book on display. This is Rosenbloom's first foray into this world. And now is a place on my bucket list to visit when the world returns to "normal".

Rosenbloom is very thorough. She takes us through the myths of these types of books, how animal skins are made into leather (honestly, enough to make me stop eating meat for a bit), how they do a quick test to see if the book is indeed human (most aren't, their lore is what makes the book valuable, not the binding), and much more. 

You would think that the bulk of the human bound books would have came from the Nazi era. You would be wrong. As Rosenbloom discovers, most books of this nature are from physician libraries, which might be more disturbing. The physicians who swear an oath to help and protect patients also take skin from patients/corpses to make into books. Some of the books found actually bind the most boring of books, yet the physician felt they were the right book to bind in human skin. Back in the day, there was a disregard for patients who were disenfranchised, because of race, gender, or poverty, and physicians felt they could do what they pleased with these folks (see: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot). Rosenbloom attended a medical school class so she could see how students of today treat the cadavers they work on and discovered there is still a bit of that clinical gaze, but there also is more emphasis on being empathic with patients and not just seeing them as things to deal with. Well, whew, I guess.

It was interesting to note that in order to donate your body to science for medical classes you must be intact, ie. nothing missing. Looks like that's not an avenue I can pursue.

There are so many interesting facts and tidbits in this book that it's well worth reading. Note that Rosenbloom is death positive and has a good view on mortality. Death isn't something to be feared and her viewpoint is infused throughout the book. A good podcast to watch on Death positivity is Ask a Mortician by Caitlin Doughty (who authors many a good book on the subject)


The author on death (potential trigger warning for photos)



Book talk with the author