“After careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration, Harvard Libraries and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee have concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in Harvard Library’s collections due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s provenance and subsequent history,” she said now university in a statement.
At the same time, the university admitted that it had itself failed to meet “ethical standards” in the past when it sometimes used an inappropriately “sensational, morbid and humorous tone” when promoting the book. The library also apologized for “further objectifying and demeaning the human being whose remains were used to bind the book.”
The most interesting museums on the planet: Where do they have a mask made of human skin and where are the most mummies?
Exoticism and America
Photo: Profimedia.cz
Writer Arsène Houssaye
In the past, for example, new students employed in the library were asked to bring in a book for fun without being told in advance that it was bound in human skin. A morbid reputation accompanied the book for a long time, but only in 2014, after examining it, did scientists confirm that it was indeed bound in human skin. Even then, the university jokingly described it as “good news” for “bibliomaniacs and cannibals”, noted the British newspaper The Guardian.
“We think it’s time to let the remains rest in peace,” Tom Hyry, the archivist at the university’s Houghton Library, announced now in a completely different tone. He added that a decision on the specific form of burial of the remains may be made in a few months, or even later.
The book about the soul should have a human cover, the doctor wrote
Des Destinées de l’Ame was written by French author Arsène Houssaye in the 1880s as a meditation on the soul and the afterlife. The first owner of the mentioned copy was the French doctor Ludovic Bouland, who had the book bound in the skin of a deceased patient. According to an earlier statement from the library, it was a woman who had been treated as mentally ill and died of a stroke.
Inside the book, according to the BBC, are Bouland’s morbid instructions that no ornament be embossed on the cover to “preserve elegance”. “I have kept this piece of human skin taken from the woman’s back,” the doctor wrote. “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human cover,” he added.
The bizarre volume has been in the university’s Houghton Library since 1934, when it was donated to the institution by the American diplomat John B. Stetson. According to the library, the practice of binding books in human skin dates back to at least the 16th century, and reached its relative peak in popularity in the 19th century. In some cases, for example, the confessions were bound in the skin of the condemned or the survivors remembered their deceased loved ones in this morbid form.
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