Judging books by their covers (Anna Honer)

Judging books by their covers: a review of Dark Archives

A book bound in human skin, a rather chilling image for most, and not a subject commonly covered in a library studies class. However, in her 2021 publication Dark Archives, UCLA librarian Megan Rosenbloom strives to show her readers the historical significance of these objects (known as anthropodermic books) and the past that they unlock. Just as many historians are facing the unpleasant truths embedded in their fields of study, Rosenbloom explores the shifts in the medical community of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that allowed for the creation of these books, and rediscovers victims whose identities were stripped from them in the name of science.

In Dark Archives, Rosenbloom details the history and current conversation around the topic of Anthropodermic Bibliopegy, the practice of binding books in human skin. As she explains it, although this concept is commonly associated more with serial killers and Nazis, it was in fact almost exclusively doctors of the nineteenth century who took up this hobby. The medical advances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries allowed doctors to treat patients more effectively than ever before. The standard of education for medical professionals was increased, encouraging “systematic ways of learning about the body and diseases, including cadaver exploration and the use of instruments to allow doctors to observe patients’ bodies in ways the patients themselves could not. The human body became a less mysterious landscape, and the patient, too, was transformed into an object to be studied-consisting of organs and the diseases that attacked them”.¹  Rosenbloom argues that it was this shift in medical education that led to the Clinical Gaze, a way for doctors to look at patients in such a dramatically detached way that the unconsensual postmortem removal of skin for their own enjoyment would not have seemed unethical to them.

In her position as a member of the Anthropodermic Book Project, Rosenbloom works alongside other historians and scientists to track down rumored anthropodermic books and test them, creating a catalog of human skin books that spans the globe. This test, known as peptide mass fingerprinting, was brought to the field of historic conservation by Daniel Kirby, a chemist by trade, who realized that historians could learn significantly more about historical objects by analyzing their proteins. This test proved effective at distinguishing animal skin from human skin, making it ideal for testing potential anthropodermic books.

While the PMF test can tell Rosenbloom and her team if the book is human, it is up to Rosenbloom to attempt to discover the identity of the person to whom the skin belonged. While some anthropodermic books have inscriptions identifying them as human skin, it is rare that their creators bothered to note from whom they took the skin. Where Dark Archives really shines is in its exploration of the lives of the few identified victims.

Anthropodermic books from the Mutter Museum collection

Rosenbloom also details the ongoing conversation about how these books should be treated by the institutions that house them. She explains that anthropodermic books “are the only books that are controversial not for the ideas they contain but for the physical makeup of the object itself. They repel and fascinate, and their very ordinary appearances mask the horror inherent in their creation”.² This makes them easy targets for those who wish to see them removed from collections, and even destroyed. Some historians and librarians argue that the books should be cremated and interred out of respect for the dead. Rosenbloom disagrees, believing that destroying them would never change the fact that they were created, it would only rob future historians and scientists of the opportunity to learn from them as science progresses.

Rosenbloom’s readable prose and well researched explorations make for a surprisingly swift read of a rather dark area of human history. Dark Archives reads like a plea to libraries and museums to allow the author and her team access to the many rumored anthropodermic books that remain untested. With only seventeen tested and confirmed human skin books in the world at the date of publication, Rosenbloom is clearly eager to get her hands on more to uncover their secrets. Dark Archives is both an unabashed participant in the “morbid gaze”, and a crusade for the importance of consent in the medical field. Rosenbloom reminds us that it is no coincidence that there are no recorded anthropodermic books created after the mid-twentieth century, when medical consent was codified into law.

Finally, Dark Archives is a reminder of the importance of acknowledging uncomfortable history instead of sweeping it under the rug, or in this case, into the crematorium. Rosenbloom states “it is easier to believe that objects of human skin are made by monsters like Nazis and serial killers, not the well-respected doctors the likes of whom parents want their children to become someday”.³ By learning from the past, we can better understand the importance of what we have in the present.

For further reading see here.

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