As it turns out, the practice of using human skin to bind books was actually pretty popular during the 17th century. It's referred to as Anthropodermic bibliopegy and proved pretty common when it came to anatomical textbooks. Medical professionals would often use the flesh of cadavers they'd dissected during their research. Waste not, want not, I suppose.
Harvard's creepy books deal with Roman poetry, French philosophy, and a treatise on medieval Spanish law for which the previously mentioned flayed skin was supposedly used. The book, Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias… has a very interesting inscription inside, as The Harvard Crimson reports.
Via Drudge: For more go here
Harvard's creepy books deal with Roman poetry, French philosophy, and a treatise on medieval Spanish law for which the previously mentioned flayed skin was supposedly used. The book, Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias… has a very interesting inscription inside, as The Harvard Crimson reports.
Via Drudge: For more go here
12 comments:
Tan me hide when I'm dead, Fred.
Hide-bound truth is bound to hide truth.
I hope they don't have "Diary of a Mad Mohel"
Actually a famous Mohel from Odessa wrote a manual about performing the briss properly which was covered in babies foreskins.
If you rubbed it got the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.
I hate it when that happens.
The Alfred Packer diaries?
The Annals of Gein-ecology?
I got nothing but skin in the game and it doesn't even fit.
Don't judge a book by its cover... now you know the rest of the story.
Improved: "Never judge a book by the cover"; early Social Justice slogan.
Lem, the story didn't mention whether the skins were all melanin-challenged so there's no reason to assume discrimination. No need for SJW's -- yet.
It's been revealed that one of the books not mentioned was a first edition of W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Binding"
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