6th June, 2014
Harvard’s university library on Friday in New York confirmed that test has shown that a 19th-century French book at the university’s library collection was bound in human skin.
Bill Lane, Director of the Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Library, said the cover of the Houghton Library’s copy of “Arsene Houssaye’s Des destinees de l’ame,” a meditation on afterlife and the human soul, was made of human skin.
He said the university began to conduct tests on the book’s cover after a note found in it by its author “Houssaye” said that it had been bound using human skin.
He said the back of the unclaimed body of a female mental patient was used, after she died of a stroke.
“This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance,” Houssaye’s note said.
“By looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin and a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” he added.
Lane said early tests showed the binding was not made of sheep or goat skin, but was most likely of human origin or made of the skin of another closely related primate, such as a great ape or gibbon.
He said further tests revealed that the cover was made of human skin.
Lane said the analytical data, taken together with the provenance of Des destinees de l’ame, make it very unlikely that the source could be other than human.