Sometimes there is a bit of a joke involved, or at the least, a pun. Skin-books bound in what? Captain Maurice Hamonneau, an ex-soldier, directed the bookshop at the American Museum of Natural. He claimed to have a copy of…
…Thomas Bateman’s Practical Synopsis of Cutaneous Diseases, or Delineations of Cutaneous Diseases. Both books require a strong stomach to get through. Hamonneau stated the book was bound in full Morocco, a term for a particular type of binding material. However, Hamonneau either misunderstood the meaning of the term, or chose to misrepresent the book, claiming that the binding material was the actual skin of a black Moroccan man. The not-so-subtle pun can also be seen with…
…Praktische Abhandlung uber die Hauktrankenheit, by Samuel Plumbe. So you can use human skin to bound books about human skin.
And then there’s…
…the Odes of Horace, by Henri Patin…
…Exemplaire relie avec de la peau humaine prise a l’amphitheatre de medicine de la faculte de Toulouse in decembre 1883…
An example of binding with human skin taken at the medical amphitheater of the faculty of Toulouse in December 1883.
The American Revolution is not the only one that involved rumors about the use of human skin for books. The…
…French Revolution produced a biazarre situation that clearly foreshadowed the claims made about the Nazis and the concentration camps. The story runs that the French revolutionaires set up a top secret arms and munitions factory in the chateau of…
…Meudon, a name I mentioned earlier. Before long, strange stories began to circulate that the bodies of beheaded victims of the guillotine were taken to Meudon, where they were flayed and the skin used to make boots, gloves, and trousers for the soldiers of the Revolution. These sort of rumors were inevitable given the wide-scale atrocities of the time. However the rumors of a human-skin tannery run by the revolutionaries persisted. According to Georges Duval…
I can neither confirm or deny it… but I can tell you what everyone believed… that at Meudon the locals showed with strange terror the windows of the lower room of the old château where they claimed that horrible “manipulations” took place; each night they heard the rumbling of covered waggons, which brought the decapitated bodies of the executed from the place de la Revolution to feed the tannery.
Jouranlist Gugilelmo Galetti, who upheld the myth of the human tannery, whether located in Meudon or not, claimed that he had in his possession a copy of the…
…French Constitution of 1793, with the Rights of Man, bound in human skin. As a result of this claim, modern commentators have created the idea of a wide-scale use of human skin for binding books by the French. There is a bizarre story that states that at a ball called Le Bal du Zephir, which was held in a grave yard, copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man bound in human skin were handed out to the guests. This is no doubt an aprocryphal story. And there may be a bit of confusion, when a copy Thomas Paine’s…
…Rights of Man is said to have been bound in the skin of a woman. There be a mis-identification between Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, and the French Rights of Man.
The French Revolution should always be dear to the hunters of skin-books. One of the thinkers whose ideas would greatly influence the French Revolution was…
…Jean Jacques Rousseau. Here I’ve shown his book titled…Emile, or Education. So whose skin bound a special volume of this work? Well, the story identifies the skin-donor to be a member of the French nobility, who was executed by the revolutaires. The story also names this noble as the Marquis Dubois, the identify of which is dubious at best.
That said, as far as the skin books of the French Revolution are concern, a strange thing happened in Leeds, England in 2006. A strange book surfaced after a bungled burglary…
This book is a ledger written in French, and rumors about it being bound in human skin have been seen by some people of evidence that during the French Revolution, skin was taken from the bodies of the victims of execution, and used to bind books. Just will be the case with the Germans in WW2, doing gruesome things with the skin of their enemies, so too the accusation was made against the French revolutionaries. But this type of accusation was used a little closer to home…Northern writers claimed that Southerners flayed their deceased slaves, and used the skin to bound family Bibles. To add a little of humor to a rather unhumorous topic, Francis Marion Crawford, the author…Doctor Claudius: a True Story, has Carlyle make the following statement…
Sir, said Carlyle, speaking for the first time during dinner, the French nobility of a hundred years ago said they could afford to laugh at theories. Then came a man and wrote a book called the Social Contract. The man was called Jean - Jacques Rousseau, and his book was a theory, and nothing but a theory. The nobles could laugh at his theory; but their skins went to bind the second edition of his book. Look to your skin, world, lest it be dressed to morocco and cunningly tooled with gold. There is much binding yet to be done.
If you can’t have the French Revolution without Rousseau, then you doubly can’t have the French Revolution without…
…Voltaire. I wounder what he think about this…
Perhaps the prized volume in the collection was a volume of Voltaire covered in the skin of a little black boy who had been a servant in the castle of the Duke of Orleans. The story is that the Duke was so fond of the Blackamoor that, upon his death, he had the undertakers remove part of his pelt to be used as the binding of a book.
Given the fact that the complete works of Voltaire consists of a whopping 205 volumes, I doubt we’ll ever know which volume is the final resting place of that fictional little boy.
If we’re talking about the Great French Tea Party, then we should balance the presentation with someone from the royalist side. And that we do…
…the Cardinal Jules Mazarin, and Duke of Mayenne. He was an Italian cardinal who became the chief minister of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, and worked closely with the infamous Cardinal Richelieu So no greater royalist there was than he. What is in Ottawa, Kansas? What was there on May 4, 1910? Well, an attorney named J.W. Deford. And what did he have? An armload of legal briefs? No. He had a book that a friend of his purchased in Berlin in 1896, and for twenty-two cents. He description was both interesting, and horrifying it. He said it was well bound in vellum, with beautiful type. On the frontispiece, was a copper engraving of…Mazarin. Deford’s son traveled to Paris, and he compared the frontispiece to the original painting, telling his father the image in the book is quite accurate. The book in question is…
The book is really a translation of the Italian book by…Galeazzo Guialdo Priorato. Another friend of our attorney checked out the book and declared the cover to be made of human skin.
It should be pointed out that French politics are not the only politics that generated human books. No doubt the focus has been on the claims about the French revolutionaries because of just how gruesome people’s behavior came to be. Now, I apologize for the quality of the following pic, but it’s the only one I could find. And what started as a mystery, became all that much more mysterious, and then ridiculous.
For many years efforts have been made to trace the history of two volumes of books at the Bristol Law Library. They were bound in human skin, and as the result of an article published earlier, the mystery has now been cleared up. The book in the center is bound in ordinary vellum; the other two are enclosed in covers made from the skin of Bristol man who was hanged for murder.
Yes, the name of the Bristol man hanged for murder is John Horwood, who I discussed earlier. But, strangely, the titles of the books aren’t provided. So a Mr. John C Langdon sprang into action and identified the books. And they, quite strangely, happened to be…
The Votes of the House of Commons in the Sixth Session of the Fourteenth Parliament of Great Britain in 1779.
So the official books documenting the sixth session of the fourteenth parliament of Great Britain were, for some reason, bound in human skin…well two of the three. I’m sure the prime minister in 1779, Lord North, who was too busy losing the war in the American colonies, would have found this situation rather upsetting…
…You bound the books in what? Seriously?
And this is 10 years before the French Revolution began. Mr. Langdon is important for another reason. He knew the books, though he went on to provide the names of…
…several local culprits who were flayed after execution to furnish the leather for some contemporary lore.
Several? Langdon went on to state that it was his grandfather who bound the John Horwood book in the executed man’s skin. However, there was skin left over. And it was kept hanging around in the book-binding office’s storeroom of the shop owned by Mr. Langdon’s grandfather. The business was passed on to Mr. Langdon’s father. When the government volumes were brought to him to be rebound, Langdon found that he had enough vellum to rebind only one of the books. No vellum? No problem. Langdon remembered the dead skin of Dead John Horwood, and being a binder in a bind, shrugged his shoulders and bound the other two volumes with the human skin. Can’t we wait for the next shipment of vellum to arrive? Apparently not. This led one newspaper reporter to say…
It would seem that it was just an accident of circumstances that caused the books to be bound in human skin.
So it was good luck for Mr. Langdon, but bad luck for Mr. Horwood, that the latter’s skin had been laying around in the book-binding shop for a generation. Of course, something else was said. Judge Bucknill was called in to give his opinion. And he said that he could see fingerprints in the skin, which, I suppose, suggests that some of the skin used came from the hand of John “New Drop” Horwood. But before leaving John horrorwood to R.I.P, I would add that another book was identified as bound in his skin…
Of course…Richard Smith. Actually, the article is incorrect. Richard Smith a surgeon at the Infirmary, who collected fourteen bulging files of…Biographical Memoirs. It was G. Munro Smith who wrote…
…A History of the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Of course, this was published in 1917, and Horwood was executed in 1921, so that would mean that Horwood’s skin was lying around for over a hundred years.
Another skin-book associated with war comes to mind. The Newbury Library is holding a strange book with no title. Perhaps the best title would be either…The Chronicles of Nawat Wuzeer Hyderabad, or the Library call number…Case Wing Y 4902 M27. The book is a history of the Dekkan people (Deccanis), and includes biographies, deeds, and genealogies. The book is rather obscure, so too the two supposed writers of the book in its present form…Nawab Wuzeer of the Hyderabad Kingdom, and copyist Mir Baki ‘Alai. It may also be connected to a work called the…Through the Help of God. The book includes two inscriptions…
Found in the palace of the King of Dehlhi, Sept. 21st 1857. Seven days after the assault.
This is a reference to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which included the Siege of Delhi. So the book was found while looting the palace. The other inscription reads…
Bound in human skin.
It would be much appreciated if someone would post a picture of this book.
Skin-books are not just gruesome…they can also be romantic. There is also the bizarre story told by the soon-to-be-famous…
…Dard Hunter. One day as he was hard at work, a strange woman entered his shop. She was a widow, and carried a bunch of letters addressed to her deceased husband. When it came to the binding, she insisted that Hunter use a type of leather that she would provide. When she returned, she indicated that the binding was skin from the back of her late husband.
During the years 1842-1843, Eugune Sue publised a novel serially in a public magazine…Les Mysteries de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). It was a smash hit from the beginning…
Word spread among bibliophiles that, in 1854, Sue had a copy made bound with the skin of a lover. It was also stated that the book had an inscription in it…This binding is from the skin of a woman, as per M. Alberic Boutaille in 1874. A two-volume edition was sold in France in 1898, bearing the inscription…
En pleine peau d’homme.
Since the skin came from a male, this would have to be a third version of skin-book-making given that the skin from the other version came from a female. So this couldn’t have been done on instructions from Sue, given the fact that he died in 1857.
But Romantic and appaling can sometimes be one and the same. Ah, yes…the French Revolution again. Well, perhaps it would be better to say…the run-up to the French Revolution…close enough at any rate. The king discussed here didn’t do anything to prevent things from spiraling out of control, so he’s as much to blame as anyone. I almost forgot the book! It was a library book, so let’s check it out…
It’s called…Relation des Mouvemens de al Ville de Messine…An Account of the Movements of the City of Messine (actual book shown). Yes, a strange and clunky name. And surely there’s a really cool inscription involved…
À la Bibliothèque de M. Bignon. Reliure en peau humaine.
From the Library of M. Bignon. Bound in human skin.
So who’s skin? And who’s M. Bignon? He’s the guy on the far right (above)…Armand Jerome Bignon, perhaps best known as the personal librarian of King Louis XV, whose on the far left. And the rumor was that King Louis XV had a rather disturbing hobby…binding books in the skin of his ex-mistresses…the kind of skin you love to touch. Not right now…I’m reading Marie. As far as the French throne was concerned, better an unhappy mistress than an ex-mistress heading for a shelf in Bignon’s Gruesome Library. After all, there’s no doubt that things would be stacked against you.
But perhaps the most romantic skin-book story is that of…
…the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, and his book…Terres du Ciel…The Lands of Heaven. Also known as…The Lady Bound Book. The story has different versions. In the first version, a young countess was dying of Tuberculosis. And she was a big fan of Flammarion. So she convinced her husband to invite Flammarion to their manor, so she could meet him. Flammarion accepted the invitation, and was told that the countess was dying. She also told him that upon her death, Flammarion would receive a gift, since Flammarion complemented the young countess for her beautiful, dazzling white shoulders. When the gift arrived, it was skin removed from the countess. Thus Flammarion bound a copy of his seminal work with her beautiful skin. In another version of the story, Flammarion never met the dying countess, who had fallen in love with him, nonetheless. She told her doctor, Dr. Ravaud…
I have a confidential confession to make to you. I have loved Camille Flammarion with a flaming devotion, and now that I am dying, I want him to have a souvenir from me. It will astonish you to know that I have never been presented to him, nor talked to him, nor even see him, but I developed such an intense admiration for Monsieur Flammarion from reading his books and following his work that I secretly fell in love with him. So I beg that as soon as I died, you cut a big piece of skin off my shoulders, and send it to him as a binding for one of books. I want my name kept a secret, however, and you must promise that if he comes and asks questions, you will not reveal my identity.
…the doctor did as the countess instructed, and following her death, he cut an ample oblong piece of skin, twelve by eighteen inches, from her torso, put it in a box, and personally delivered it to Flammarion’s house. There was an explanatory note included, and the astronomer used the skin and bound a copy of Terres du Ciel. The following inscription appeared in the book…
Execution pieuse d’un voeu anonyme. Reliure en peau humaine…
This is the pious fulfilment of an anonymous vow. The book is bound with human skin.
Yet another version of the story supposedly came from Flammarion’s widow…
I often talked to my husband about this mystery before his death in 1925. He said that when he was living in the Rue Cassini, beside the Paris Observatory, in 1882 he returned home late one morning after a night spent looking at the stars. As he passed the concierge’s lodge, he was handed a little packet, saying that a professional-looking man had delivered it, and specified that it be given to my husband personally. My husband said that he smelled a curious odor and had a momentary shiver, as though he sensed something ghastly. When he reached his apartment, he opened the package with nervous fingers, wondering what he would find. As he undid the wrappings of oiled paper and red ribbons he felt a sickening sensation come over him. He was so excited, that the package dropped to the floor and a big piece of soft human skin unfolded before his eyes. He was amazed at first, but then concluded that some medical students had played a trick on him. But as he looked through the wrappings, a note dropped out.
The note read as follows…
True to my promise, I have carefully carried out the request of the dead countess who always love you. She begged me to send you, the day after her death, the skin of her lovely shoulders. This is the skin, and you must promise that you will used it to bind a copy of the first book you may publish now, after her death. I have delivered this souvenir to you, Monsieur, as I faithfully promised.
The doctor signed his name. So Flammarion rushed to visit the doctor, to find out who the owner of the flesh was. Ravaud said…
I gave her my word of honor while she was dying that I would not reveal her name. All I can tell you is that she was a marvelously attractive young woman, a member of one of the first families of France, and that she secretly adored you from the time she was a young girl. I had a horror of mutilating such lovely shoulders, but I promised the countess I would do it and keep my promise. A few minutes after she passed on, I took off the skin and personally delivered it to your house to make sure you would get it. I did not even tell her family about her strange request, and I will carry the secret of her identity to the grave with me.
He was later asked about the story by a Dr. Cabanes, and gave this account…
The story has been somewhat elaborated. I don’t know the name of the person whose dorsal skin was delivered to me by a physician to use for binding. It was a matter of carrying out a pious vow. Some newspapers, especially in America, published the portrait, the name and even the photograph of the chateau where “the Countess” dwelt. All of that is pure invention. The binding was successfully executed by Engel, and from then on the skin was unchanging. I recollect I had to carry this relic to a tanner in the Rue de la Reine-Blanche, and three months were required for the job. Such an idea was assuredly bizarre. However, in point of fact, this vestige of a beautiful body is all that survives of it today, and it can endure lastingly in a perfect state of respectful preservation. The desire of the unknown woman was to have my last book published at the time of her death bound in this skin. The octavo edition of the Terres du Ciel, published by Didier enjoys this honor.
On May 31, 1924, the Boston Transcript stated that the woman was the Countess St. Agnes…
Of course, Flammarion was probably correct when he says that the origin of the information has nothing but space between his ears…seeing how the source states that Flammarion was going to use the skin to bind his book…Heaven and Hell. Flammarion never wrote a book with this name.
The following purports to show…
…Flammarion holding the book bound in the woman’s skin. Indeed. But he is credited with making another skin-book…
However, there may be confusion as to which book is the skin-book. By the way…don’t draw dogs on library books! Darla says she didn’t do it. The plausible question arises…how much credibility should be given to Flammarion? Perhaps this may help…
That is a lot of haunted houses, but relax and have no fear…all 5,600 cases are inauthentic.
A pre-death agreement to come back from the dead? I’ll bet that’s Les Terres du Ciel on the desk.
Yes, Flammarion is in the market to buy a ghost. If you can find one, drag it to Flammarion, and make $2,000 on the deal. Darla is right now trying to figure out how to trap ghost.
But! Flammarion was more than a mere Ghostologist. He thought a great deal about Mars…
However, I may say finally that I really do think that there is life on Mars, but whether the life existing of Mars in the souls that have left our sphere, it is very hard to say. I have long studied the question of Mars; I know the canals by heart; weird, wonderful things which seem to suggest that they are of the work of Martian engineers. The probability that reincarnation comes into its own in Mars is not beyond possibility. Only time will tell; but believe me, the telling will take a long time, a very long time.
Martian engineers? Annabelle thinks that’s…way cool!
Certainly engineers are not enough! And Flammarion is on my side…
Mars is inhabited by a race of frail farmers, who live much longer that earth people, is the opinion of Flammarion, French astronomer, who believes that someday science will be able to establish communications between earthlings and the Martians.
Still, If you stop looking upward, and start looking down at your feet, you may develop yet another hobby. Flammarion decided thing to do was to dig a big hole all the way to the center of the earth…
From the big hole will come unlimited motive force from the interior heat. And those unknow substances to transform life! Why do you smile? As yet we have only a glimpse of the magical properties of radium. If scientists had a pound of radium they might work miracles. And as radium is never found pure, may it not not be a feeble, degenerate product of something far more powerful as uranium in 1901 was feebler than magical radium? Deeper down! Flammarion says we may find anything by going deeper down. There may be vast cavernous spaces inhabited by strange beings evolved under enormous pressure.
I will not respond to the ridiculously wrong statements about Lovely Radium, since it will turn out to be one of the most dangerous compound to human beings…well…it’s on the list. So, we have farmers and engineers on Mars, and little squished guys living in the middle of the Earth. And somehow, somewhere, sometime, Flammarion became the most dangerous man in the history of the human species…
Is it not possible, he asks, that the only way to wipe all the blemishes from the face of the earth is to wipe all humanity off it?
Clean off the globe, suggests Flammarion, and start right.
So now, or it so it would seem, Flammarion far exceeds all the genoicidal manics in history put together. After all, those guys just wanted to kill some people, whereas Flammarion would kill every human being in existence. Wouldn’t that include himself? But it’s really not that bad…the Earth could be repopulated by little guys suck up up through Flammarion’s Magical Hole.
But the romantic must give way to the erotic…more bang for the book. Enter the French poet…
…Charles Baudelaire, whose work focused on eroticism and decadent living, and gathered together in a work titled…Les Fleurs du Mal…The Flowers of Death. Great name for a horror film or a heavy-metal song. He stated that he wanted to bind his book with the skin of his girlfriend. It’s not certain whether he actually did so. But no discussion of erotic flaying of human skin could be complete without the master novelist and paragon of virtue…
…the Marquis de Sade. To know him is to love him! You can’t know virtue until you know vice. And when it comes to vice, de Sade’s your guy.
Originally, the two separate novels…Justine, and…Juliette, were published individually. But as this image shows, the two novels were combined into a single volume. There has been an enduring legend that there were copies of this book bound with the skin of women’s breasts. This was been affirmed by Isidore Liseux, said to be an ardent publisher of so-called obscene works. But what else would we expect from de Sade? Oh, I almost forgot…
…what’s good for Phyllis and Xanthippe, is good for de Sade as well. It could have been much worse. As an aside, the binder of…
Yes! In Praise of Women’s Breasts…a truly classic children’s book. Scratch that. In making the image, I was delighted to put the French Revolution back into the yeasty mix. I like how the guy holding the musket seems less absorbed in killing French nobles, and is more content to admire the view. I also like how Lady France is scowling at him for being distracted. And gee, I wonder what Mercier de Compiegne is pondering. To quote the old Christmas song…these are two of my favorite things. I think that’s how it goes. But to quote that old saying…what’s good for de Sade is good for Mercier…
We bound one book…Éloge des Seins, by Mercier de Compiègne. We had embedded in the morocco of the dish a woman's breast skin with the tip in the center, very flattened, moreover, being tanned with the rest.
Not just breast skin, which does go well with the subject at hand, but included is a squashed nipple in the middle of the cover. Now that’s disturbing. But there’s more…
When Mercier de Compiègne wrote his Éloge du sein des femmes, he was far from imagining the scenery that would one day be given to the binding of a reprint of his work which, perhaps, would have clearly cut off his inspiration. The two dishes carry, in fact, embedded in full morocco, in two circles of 0m10 in diameter approximately, two breasts of women – women is here intentionally in the plural, because one is frankly that of a brunette while the other has, certainly, belonged to a blonde. Perhaps they were once compared to strawberries in a milk jug; They have lost all of their past freshness and are now wilted, yellow and parchment.
There we are…a blond and a brunette…I like a book with an open mind. Redheads? Sure…they were once compared to strawberries in a milk jug. Look at the strawberries in those milk jugs! But, alas!
When we think of the regrets of the Belle Heaumière in front of her "little tetins" once "so cute," to see each other thus changed…Poor, dry, lean, and small. What would be the lamentations of the two unfortunate women to whom these ablations were made, if they were given to contemplate these two washers with their parched nipples, flattened in the shape of wads of small caliber cartridges?
So watch out guys, they…
…can kill!
But thank heavens! There’s more on de Sade…isn’t there always? His final work was …
Philosophie in the Bedroom, which was published after his death. Oh, it was also published posthumously as well. And it is at this point that the trade in human-based products rears its ugly head. In 1910, a man named J.G. Bord browsed in a bookstore located on the Rue de Seine. He found a copy of Philosophie that the dealer insisted was bound with the skin of a woman. The dealer even claimed that he knew the name of the woman in question, which seems highly likely since he apparently wouldn’t provide it. And French authorities included a statement regarding the book…
Take note! The editorial staff reminds everyone that the sale of pieces of human bodies is prohibited under article 16.1 of the Civil Code. However, an exception is made if such sales are clearly made in order to preserve important cultural objects.
Really? Perhaps Article 16.1 of the Civil Code should investigate the sale of holy, Christian relics…or is that different? But! Is this the actual book made from the skin of The Known Yet Unknown Woman? I don’t know…go ask J.G. Bord. However, it would seem, if you think about it, that someone…
…found a good use for de Sade’s writings. And what good is Sado-Masochism without a cup of hot coffee? And it is strange that with so many holy skull religious artifacts, that…
…an Unholy de Sade skull casting exists. Missing a head? We can simply turn de Sade into a…
…cephalophore. Oh, yes. A man after de Sade’s own heart. Or is it…de Sade’s influencer? And what a story!
…Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier des Chartreux, by Jean-Charles Gervais de Latouche, written in 1741. The novel was originally written anonymously…for good reason. The novel was unabashedly pornographic, especially at the time it was written. It features incest, venereal disease, all manner of sexual behaviors, castration, and criticism of the Catholic church. And so it was that a rich man, in the year 1871, made concerted efforts to obtain the skin of a woman who had been executed. He intended to have a bookbinder use the skin to bind his copy of Portier des Chartreux. He wasn’t able to get his hands on the skin he so ardently sought. What he did get was an attempt to murder him.
Now I can’t say for sure, and I hate to speak for such classy writers as de Sade, Jean-Charles Gervais, and Mercier de Compiegne, but three combined don’t top…
I would add a comment about a book called…
…The Perfumed Garden, an Arabic sex manual written by Sheikh Nefzawi sometime in the 1400s. It makes for a good read if you’re in the mood. No headaches allowed. One thing that is truly amazing about The Perfumed Garden is that it lists 30 different words for the male penis, and 40 different words for the female vagina. Alas, I know but a few, but since I downloaded this book for free, I anticipate mastering all 70 terms for human genitalia. And I’ll be sure to use them in a sentence. My favorite words for the human vulva are…El deukkak…The crusher, and El becha…The Horror. Now, was there a copy bound in human skin? Perhaps, but it is just fiction, seeing that the claim is to be found in…
…Robert Briffault’s…Europa…
Prince Nevidof pointed out the rich and exquisitely tooled bindings stamped with elaborate designs of lingams and yonis. He showed some volumes bound in human skin. The Perfumed Garden of the Sheikh Nafsawi was bound in the skin of a negress.
Erotica…Erotica…Erotica. Enter the Arab named Iskandar-al-Machribi, who, in 1917, wrote a book called…
…Le Divan D’Amour du Cherif Soliman…Cherif Soliman’s Couch of Love. This work was originally in Arabic but has been translated into French. Is this erotica?
…that answers that question. And like so many works of Erotica, one edition was found that was bound in the skin of a woman.
I would add a comment about a book called…
…Mademoiselle Giraud ma Femme, by Adolphe Belot, that isn’t really erotic per se, but the subject of the story, a man finds that his wife is really…a lesbian, and the great damage it did to him. Of course, this topic was very controversial when it was published in 1870. In 1891, an English translation was made…with a kicker. There is a note on the flyleaf that says…bound in human skin. This note was written by S.B. Luyster, head of the Brentano Rare Book Department, who is the obvious qualification of the initials S.B.L. associated with the note. The book is at Brown University, who has a letter dated November 10, 1936, from Sam Loveman of the Bodley Book shop attesting to the human skin in the binding.
Still, what’s better than authenticated haunted houses and knowing Unknown Women?
…Emile Deschanel’s Le Mal et Le Bien qu’on a dit des Femmes…The Bad and Good Things That Can Be Said About Women. It has been recorded that…
…Just before the last war the Chéramy sale in Paris offered an octavo edition of Émile Deschancel's Le bien qu'on a dit des femmes bound in peau de femme (with sworn certification in writing to this effect by three reputable Parisians.)
Another source states that the certificate said…
Hic liber de feminis ut viris amabilior esset, femineam cutem induced. Testibus his : Edmond Crozet – F. Raymond – A. Michard.
This book about women being more attractive to men, bound in human skin of a woman, witnesses to this being Edmond Crozet, F. Raymond, and A. Michard.
Wow…a certificate of authenticity signed by three reputable Parisians! A similar claim is made about…
…Le Merite des Femmes…by Gabriel Legouve…In Praise of Women. Unlike de Sade and others, this book praised the virtue, yet depicted women as locked into their traditional roles.
It’s usually the case that the book is named, whereas the skin donor is not. But it is possible to go in the opposite direction. An article in the Pall Mall gazette stated that…
When the writer was last in Paris, he was shown a small book by a dealer, who solemnly avowed it was bound in a portion of the skin of the notorious Louvet de Convray, and which he valued at one thousand francs, and for authenticity of which he produced a long pedigree.
I don’t suppose he was lying to separate you from 1,000 francs. Of course, this takes back once again to the French Revolution, since Louvet was a leader in that conflict, and managed to survive Robespierre. And while we’re back to the French Revolution, we a rather troubling book with a bizarre backstory. A surgeon by the name of Auguste Reverdin inherited a book from a friend. We aren’t given the name of the book, but we know that the one who gifted the book required that Reverdin accept the skin of his deceased friend. Reverdin cut a piece of skin from the cadaver’s breast, and had it tanned at Annecy at an exorbitant price. Having done so, he gave the skin to Marcellin Pellin, a historian of the French Revolution. Pellin used the skin to bind his personal copy of…
…Alamanach des Prisons. I suppose that a French prison during the Revolution was not a good place to be. That said, it would seem to be written during the rule of the great mass murderer…
Oh what cheaters they are. Why? Men like the hated and feared Robespierre produce images of themselves that are pure fantasy, as shown in the pictures above. But probably quite accurate presentations of men like Robespierre are being produced…
Robespierre suffered from disease called…sarcoidosis, which for Robespierre, manifested itself on his face. Have you ever heard the old saying…hoist on your own guillotine? After sending an estimated 17,000 people to the hereafter, Robespierre himself passed his final moments waiting for the blade to fall upon his neck. And fall it did…
And since skin-books are morbid, and that is the main topic here, it should be noted that there was great interest in Robespierre’s severed head, that took the form of…
…various death masks, and note that the sarcoidosis sores are visible on these death masks. So it isn’t for nothing that the book in question was also called…Almanac of the Prisoners Under Robespierre.