Book Review: Dark Archives

Anthropodermic books, or books made out of human skin. This sentence alone can stir a lot of feelings. After reading The Butchering Art, I felt like I could stomach a book like Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom. I experienced discomfort, curiosity, and slight disgust as I discovered the not so ancient and disturbing art of using human skin as a medium for binding books. 

Human skin book binding sounds so far fetched - what kind of person would consciously go through the painstaking process of prepping and tanning human skin, especially for something as trivial as book covers? A pattern that is emphasized by Rosenbloom is that many of these books were owned by professionals in the medical field. I suppose if someone were to value a human skin book, it would be somebody who is fascinated (and maybe mildly obsessed) with the human body. Surgeons and doctors during the 1800s — the time period when many of these human skin books were bound — were essentially, for a lack of better terms, amateur butchers whose profession wielded power over the bodies of the poor, sick, and suffering. 

The absence of medical consent and dignity meant that medical researchers and professionals could harvest human bodies guilt free, even if it meant digging up graves (grave robbers) or repurposing the bodies of criminals, the poor, and the sick. Although there is a lot of mystery surrounding anthropodermic books, Rosenbloom poetically brings these skin books back to life, exposing a history of power imbalances. Whether its an institutionalized woman (Des destinées de l'ame) , a criminal (Narrative of the Life of James Allen),  or a poor woman (Recueil des secrets),  there is something deeply disturbing and fascinating about these books, and the people who chose to bind them in human skin. 

It's an intensely gross process, akin to the process of preparing and tanning animal skin. It's hard to imagine that a piece of someone's body was used in this way, or is it? Human beings can be pretty cruel; what makes binding a book in human skin different from everything else? There is no scale for things like this. Human book binding is one of the many instances of how we human beings try to posses one another. Whether its war, collapse, or humiliation, it appears that we care more about getting our point across than actually caring about each other. These books are symbols of power, and of how we humans covet having the last laugh over humility. 

Human skin books are a double edged sword. Although they are the remains of someone who was once living, they are also a testament to a very real, and very strange and dark time. I don't think we should bury these books; doing so would only make it feel less real and more distant. We need reminders of such cruel and gruesome artifacts to have something to anchor onto as we navigate towards our better, collective potential. I don't want to forget history, I want to see its ugly, disturbing face. I want to be shaken; if you aren't rattled, then nothing will ever change.