Book Binding With Human Flesh
Monstrous or a little less monstrous...
I’ve been reading this book, Dark Archives, about anthropodermic bibliopegy, which us regular boys (as opposed to fancy boys) call “binding books in human skin.”
The book brings up an ethical question: Should books bound in human skin be preserved, or should they be destroyed/laid to rest?
First Things First
We’re not talking about creating any new books bound in human flesh. That’s…another topic. More for, I don’t know, bookbinding weirdos. I AM a bookbinding weirdo, just not that specific kind of bookbinding weirdo.
It’s hard being a bookbinding weirdo because there aren’t a whole lot of us. It’s like being super into, I don’t know, ants. How many ant experts are out there? How many unfamiliar faces at the ant convention?
No, we’re talking about books, bound in human flesh, that are currently held by libraries.
Sometimes libraries end up with shit in the collection that we don’t love. Usually something like a collection of old-ass children’s books or vaguely-racist locked room mysteries donated in the name of some dead person, so you feel like a dickhead if you toss them.
The other thing is that curating a collection, especially one that would contain items like books bound in human flesh, often involves working with items that one might find personally distasteful.
So the way we’ll play this out: we’re going to pretend I’m responsible for a collection that does include items bound in human flesh, and I’ll do my best to defend their place in that hypothetical collection.
Destroy: They’re gross
Eh, I mean, sure, but it’s not like you’re going to accidentally check out The Da Vinci Code and find out it’s bound in human skin. We’re talking about books that are, for the most part, hundreds of years old, and they’re not just sitting on the library shelves or something.
There’s almost no chance you’ll come across one of these by accident, so if viewing or handling them only happens when people seek them out, still might be gross, but everyone knows what they’re signing up for.
Plus, if you happened to stumble upon one, you probably wouldn’t even know. Human skin, tanned and processed, is indistinguishable from animal leather without using a process called Peptide Mass Fingerprinting.
I think it’s alright. It’s like having some fucked-up shit at a museum. As long as I’m not looking at a caveman diorama this minute, a dissected corpse the next, no warning in between, I think we’re alright.
Destroy: This is some Nazi shit!
There were some controversies surrounding lampshades that may or may not have been made from human flesh by some Nazis, and it’s not been definitively proven that there were, in fact, lampshades made of human flesh in Nazi possession. Most serious scholars would side on “probably not” if forced to decide whether or not Nazis had human lampshades.
Nazis never claimed to have books bound in human flesh, that claim was not made against them. Human skin books were around hundreds of years before the Nazis. They were also, historically, not created by maniacal mass murderers, rather doctors who considered this an act that was…not DISrespectful.
So while this practice may seem macabre, it’s not a Nazi thing. Destroying human skin books in order to fight Nazis in some capacity or diminish their legacy would be a misguided act.
Destroy: This is a dangerous, unsanitary practice
Human corpses are not inherently dangerous. This is a long-held myth that is a result of superstition fed in more modern times by the funeral industry.
Human flesh that has been tanned and processed poses no more threat than leather shoes or a leather belt.
Destroy: The skin was often (perhaps always) taken without consent
This is the biggest case for destroying the books, if you ask me.
I don’t have a lot to say against this, but I’ll make an argument.
Although these items were created without consent, and I see that as bad, I don’t necessarily see destroying these items as restoring consent or some sense of balance. Consent in something like this can’t really be restored.
Views on human corpses have changed A LOT over the last 200 years. Views on human bodies as well. And views on consent have changed drastically in even the last 20 years.
Whenever our views change, we tend to consider our past views incorrect and our current views the most correct way of looking at something, and we think of our views as the way events from hundreds of years ago SHOULD HAVE been viewed at that time as well. Taking someone’s skin is wrong now, and it should have been viewed as wrong then, as well.
What we forget is that EVERY people of EVERY era think this. People in the 70’s thought people in the 50’s should have done things differently. People in the 2000’s think people in the 70’s didn’t have it quite right, either.
So, if we destroy the human skin books because our views today tell us that’s the right thing to do, we are making an assumption: the views we hold today are objectively correct, and 200 years from now, we won’t see that destruction as, perhaps, an equal or greater act of barbarism than binding the books in the first place.
In fact, if we consider it logically, it’s FAR more likely our opinion will change than it is likely that our opinion will remain constant.
I know, it sounds weird and wrong, but I think it’s entirely possible that the destruction of these books today would be viewed, 200 years from now, as a superstitious, destructive, silly thing to do. People in the future might view that the way most of us view the idea that having your picture taken steals your soul.
I don’t say any of this to justify the past, I say it to suggest that perhaps, in another 200 years, we’ll hold a different, just-as-distant view of what it means to do something like bind a book in human skin without express consent, and further we might have a very different view on what it means to destroy that item.
Let’s make this shorter: I don’t think the people who made these had the right to make them, however, I don’t know that I have the right to destroy them.
Destroy: What more can we learn from these objects?
Perhaps a lot!
DNA testing only really got going in the 1980s, and in fact it still hasn’t come quite far enough along to tell us much about these human skin books.
A different sort of testing is used to determine whether the books are human because DNA testing has been wrong many times due to the books being contaminated, handled by so many people.
In fact, current testing only works on the assumption that the skin used is not that of an ape. While the testing can determine the difference between a goat and a horse, it cannot determine the difference between a human and a gorilla. Everyone working with these is assuming the skin is human because there aren’t really recorded cases of gorilla-bound books.
I don’t doubt that these are human skin, I’m not saying we should preserve them because we can’t be sure, I’m saying that it’s very reasonable to assume the science behind this is in its infancy.
So, even if we analyzed them to our fullest capabilities today, it’d leave a lot on the table, and if the books were destroyed, we might not be able to analyze them further.
To put this simply, if the books bound in human skin had been destroyed in the 70’s, we wouldn’t have even tested them and confirmed which were real and which were fakes (A LOT of them are fakes). If we’d destroyed them because we didn’t have the tools to learn more about them at the time, we’d have missed out on quite a bit.
Ultimately
I think we should keep them.
My first instinct is to “lay them to rest.” However, coming in at a close second is the more logical side, which says we should consider whether it’s possible that destroying these items might not be the “right” thing to do.
If we must make a decision today, destroy them today or preserve them forever, that’d be a tough call.
And I think that’s the issue: it’s not a matter of destroy them today or destroy them never. We can make the decision to preserve them today and re-evaluate that decision in the future. We can reasonably expect that we’ll have better tools and an increased ability to evaluate these materials, learn about the past, and perhaps even figure out the specific people they came from.
And in the meantime, we can “use” these items in a more respectful, non-destructive way that reflects our current views.
My Suggestions:
If we keep them:
These materials should be retained in specialized archives and museums.
Buying and selling these materials privately should be made illegal in order to eliminate most concerns about a collector’s market.
The materials should be analyzed by historians and genealogists to determine whether it might be possible to figure out who the skin belonged to.
If it’s possible to find out who the skin belonged to, and if they have living relatives, those relatives should be contacted, brought up to speed, and they can decide whether the materials can be displayed or used in research purposes.
Museum and other displays can focus on the nature of these books’ creation, and use it as a way to talk about the changing world, especially the world of medical consent. These objects can open up conversations about how far we’ve come and where we should be headed in the future.
If we destroy them:
The materials should be analyzed to see if we can figure out who the skin belongs to.
If we can, their relatives should be given the option to have the materials destroyed in a manner of their choosing, whatever they estimate would best represent the wishes of the dead. For example, some religions would be opposed to cremation, and if we’re working on a best guess at the wishes of the deceased, let’s do it right.
If we cannot determine the person of origin, I think we should retain the items for re-evaluation as newer forms of identification technology are explored, and/or as more genealogical resources are uncovered and digitized. Because we may not be able to figure it out today, but if we can figure it out in 20 years, I think that’s better than destroying the items today. The items can be put on a schedule for review, every 10 years, let’s say, and once the technology catches up to the point we could at least be reasonably sure about the place of origin and time period, we could make a better-than-random guess about the person’s beliefs and treat the materials accordingly.
Last Bit
This is one person’s opinion or ideas, and I don’t think they should be the only opinions or ideas out there. This is by no means a definitive or complete decision on the topic, and I’m strongly of the opinion that the ultimate fate of these materials should be determined by a group of knowledgeable people who can truly speak to the value of these and similar items in a museum collection.
I want to put the word out there because I think we need to stop pretending these items don’t exist. Let’s deal with them, even if dealing with them means leaving them alone.