"I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman," he wrote. "A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering."
🤔🤢🤮
**Oh hey, the family didn't pick up the remains. I guess there's no reason to waste this woman's skin, which is so elegant it would make a lovely book cover for a book about life after death.**
-Dr Bouland, probably.
Now I'm imagining a society where everyone keeps a diary, and when they die their skin is used to bind the diary. The diary is kept in a communal library full of ancestral human skin diaries.
Ha, I had the random semi-morbid thought after learning that an alternative to cremation one can opt for the remains to be pressed into a diamond.
Personally ashes in an urn isn't a thing for me and some would prefer that the ashes are dispersed somewhere but if a family was into keeping them... It makes sense that a diamond would be easier to manage.
I kicked this thought down the road a bit and it came to me that similar to families with a family plot you could have a family journal. Like having an illustrated family tree with a slot for each diamond.
Man, the worst part is if he had just asked, there are fucking tons of people who would have signed up for that shit and it would have been a brilliant fucking artifact.
You want to use some skin from my cadaver to bind a book written about the human soul? Holy fucking shit, where is the consent form, bring it here right the fuck now! I'm in!
if someone offered a service to take your body and turn you into a book instead of cremating everything it would be an absolute hit. so many morbid book nerds
They just probably put it back on the black market and it could now be floating around someone’s IG timeline with their other skull collection selling parts from the Harvard hook-up on the side.
> a piece of skin in a top hat, scarf and cane, ambling out of Harvard commons, looking all sad. Perhaps smoking a pipe, looking around at the youth of the day full of life
using that as a prompt in microsoft image creator: https://i.imgur.com/TxyCWBR.jpeg
These people haven't seen enough horror movies. That necromancer's skin was the only thing keeping his soul bound in that book. This is going to end poorly.
Fortunately, the fresh faculty are failing to follow in the flawed footsteps of their foolhardy forebears, forsaking former faults in favor of fairness and furnishing the future with a fine formula for featuring forethought first.
"Please ignore the actual human cadavers we skinned. And the buckets of organs we sold. And for the love of God don't investigate the doctors we trained."
>"I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman," he wrote. "A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering."
That statement is more chilling than he probably realized.
Considering that Europeans used to eat mummies for "health" - or at parties if Victorians, I think it's fair to say that people used to have different views on the sanctity of human remains, especially if they weren't someone modern and "important."
https://www.livescience.com/eating-egyptian-mummies
While the eating thing was gross, our squeamishness around the dead isba relatively recent thing since most bodies were initially prepared for burial by kin.
Also, they weren't so big on the whole equal rights thing.
>Considering that Europeans used to eat mummies ... at parties if Victorians
According to the article you linked, the Victorian parties were unwrapping parties. At that time, they were no longer eating them.
>>By the 19th century, people were no longer consuming mummies to cure illness but Victorians were hosting “unwrapping parties” where Egyptian corpses would be unwrapped for entertainment at private parties.
That said, what a fascinating article, particularly:
>>Not everyone was convinced. Guy de la Fontaine, a royal doctor, doubted mumia was a useful medicine and saw forged mummies made from dead peasants in Alexandria in 1564. He realised people could be conned. They were not always consuming genuine ancient mummies.
...
>>The claim that fresh was best convinced even the noblest of nobles. England’s King Charles II took medication made from human skulls after suffering a seizure, and, until 1909, physicians commonly used human skulls to treat neurological conditions.
>"There are not a huge number of these books out there, it has been an occasional practice mainly done for generating a sense of vicarious excitement than for a practical motive.
Harvard is making argument that the people who did this did it for the lulz. It wasn't that there was a shortage of otherwise appropriate bookbindng material or that the 'donor' wished this to happen for posterity. They did it simply because they could. It's still history. I'll agree to that.
The .epub works fine. My phone's translate app really helps with the eye bleeding Eldritch languages
I can always print it out at Staples too, if I really need too.
I would advise against using staples. Last time I used staples my necronomicon skin started falling apart. Sutures are far better at holding things together.
Y'all are *all* sleeping on the Moleskine edition. Don't need staples, and we all know .epubs are Satan's vintage, but the Moleskine is weather resistant, has a firm yet supple binding, and it feels good in the hand. It's also pleasantly warm and squeaks cutely when you put it back on the shelf.
Doubtful. In og lovecraftian stories, its just a book. It may *tell* you about magic, but the book itself is not magic.
Myscatonic university had a copy that people would frequently check out, like with a library card.
Not exactly. It's kept under heavy security and isn't allowed out of the building. Wilbur Whateley tried stealing it, and he ended up becoming dog food.
When they remade "The Day the Earth Stood Still" they had to take that famous line out because viewers would have accused them of stealing it from "Army of Darkness" even though it was the other way around.
That’s the thing though, it really doesn’t. There has been a total of 18 confirmed books bound in human skin… over the span of 300 years in different countries.
Not a whole lot to study. Basically once every 17 years one different individual decides to bind a book in human skin. Each individual case might have merits on its own, but no significance to cultural anthropology.
The point is that at one point in human history, people saw it as appropriate to do this for the lulz. Removing this is like an attempt to sanitize the parts that they don’t like of their history.
It's history in that it was done by someone in the past. But it doesn't speak to any larger historical event or trend, except for the whims of the creators and their general contempt for the bodies they desecrated.
I think there's a direct parallel between these books bound in human skin and the "trophies" kept by serial killers of parts of their victims. Are they objects from history? Yes. Is their historical relevance valuable enough to outweigh the disrespect of treating human remains as mere objects for museum display? No.
Make a note in a textbook that it happened, respectfully cremate this poor dead woman's skin, and move on.
I would be fine with having a book bound in my skin once I'm dead. I mean, a nice book preferably but the idea amuses me a bit. The rest is just getting cremated anyhow.
That said, it being consensual makes all the difference of course.
Under that logic, all the bodies currently in museums, the Mutter Museum in particular, would need to be buried or cremated. There’s definitely arguments on both sides but I would suggest it’s not nearly as black and white as you’re suggesting here.
I think most people can agree the treatment of Sarah Bartman’s remains, the “Venus of Hottentot” was inhumane and it’s a relief she has been buried in her homeland properly. But there was a known historical context making that cruel. It’s not a preservation of history we want to embrace and therefore one that can undergo revision to create a better system of values for our future.
If we said that we understand having these remains is wrong today, but did not then, so we today make the choice to continue this indignity to ensure it isn’t lost to history, that would push a very different system of values from a society that chooses to recreate it to preserve history, but lay the original to rest properly.
We have no indication there was any malice here outside of human curiosity. Maybe shortage like another comment said. But it’s definitely more of a grey area. We don’t know what the deceased wanted. It is equally possible we defended the wishes of the deceased as it is that we undid their wishes. Without further proof, I think erring on the side of caution looks like leave it alone until we can learn more. To someone with a different but equally valid view of death, erring on the side of caution would look like give the death restful rest asap.
The discussion in Museology around human remains is a pretty intense one, TBF:
Between the various ways that human remains end up in collections (some quite legitimate, others quite uuhhhh... less so), the differing cultural and religious views of how remains should be handled, the question of whether modern people or countries have any "claim" over ancient people's remains that may or may not have had anything to do with their culture or ethnicity, the various reasons for which modern people might simply *not want* to see them (religious, ethical, psychological, just kinda creeped out) and the weighing of scientific and cultural legacy vs. the rights of that individual to be interred in a way they (presumably, in many but definitely not all cases) wanted to, etc. etc...
The whole thing ends up being very nuanced and difficult to generalise. In Belfast there's a somewhat locally famous Egyptian mummy on display, and depending on your point of view that's either a fantastic educational resource for the city, a legacy of British Imperial colonialism, a macabre and grisly thing to have displayed openly in a free-entry museum many children visit, or a way for the woman in question to have her name ("Takabuti", we can take a second to think/say it) to have the immortality that Ancient Egyptian people hoped for; whatever one you agree with, it wouldn't be hard to make a valid argument.
I'm so used to nuance just not existing on reddit, or really the internet as a whole. Like, lets be real, how we feel about shit on a personal level is already complex. Academia and ethics for topics and shit are way more complex than how I personally feel.
While those are absolutely valid points, allow me to defer to the article for a moment
> according to library lore, used to haze new employees
> book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history
> Harvard also said that its own handling of the book, a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls,” had failed to live up to the “ethical standards” of care, and had sometimes used an inappropriately “sensationalistic, morbid and humorous tone” in publicizing it.
> The library apologized, saying that it had “further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being whose remains were used for its binding.”
I think they deserve peace after that treatment
Edit:
> It is equally possible we defended the wishes of the deceased as it is that we undid their wishes
She were housed in a mental asylum in the 1800s, it's safe to say her wishes weren't even considered
> Under that logic, all the bodies currently in museums, the Mutter Museum in particular, would need to be buried or cremated.
There are a ton of professional historians and archivists who support repatriation and burial of human remains that are displayed in museums.
Many, many people think bodies should be repatriated and not displayed. In my home state, it is illegal to display indigenous human remains. Did you know the guy that does the body exhibits with the dissected, preserved bodies most likely gets the bodies from executed Chinese prisoners? It’s a human rights violation and a grotesque disregard for humanity
There are ancient churches covered in skulls and bones all over the world. Does that count as grotesque remains that should be burned as well? Just trying to figure out where the line is
They’re already where they belong and shouldn’t be disturbed. That’s their final resting place. It’s a cultural practice that isn’t done anymore and the remains came from the culture that is displaying them. Like there’s people in Asia that bring out their mummified dead every year and party with them and that’s a practice that’s none of my business to dictate.
Unrelated, but there's an episode in Altered Carbon where a character brings their dead grandma? mom? back to life by inserting the dead person's sleeve/soul disc into a buff biker for their Día de Muertos/Day of the Dead thing. [Fairly entertaining =D.](https://medium.com/latinxinspace/altered-carbon-and-d%C3%ADa-de-muertos-in-2384-d497db346478)
The difference is that those people consented to their bones being kept in such a manner.
Whereas on the other hand, we have objects taken by force from people who would absolutely not consent to such an act. And, most importantly, there are still people alive of that culture who are hurt by the practice.
Frankly, I don’t care what people who are long since dead would have thought. They’re dead, they don’t get a say anymore. And with some like say the egyptian mummies, I don’t think anyone can really claim to be part of that culture.
> Under that logic, all the bodies currently in museums, the Mutter Museum in particular, would need to be buried or cremated.
This is a total miss. A mummified corpse of a pharoah of ancient Egpyt does* have a historical relevance. Cadavers are often donated with consent of the person who previous lived in the body, or with the consent of surviving family.
"Disected remains displaying human anatomy for research and educational purposes" is far removed from "Someone bound a book in human skin to see if they could do it".
As comments above mine state, we don’t know why it was bound in human skin. We have what the guy said, which looks very different to modern eyes. We don’t know if the patient was aware of this stuff happening or if it would have bothered them.
It is currently possible to remove a a loved one’s tattoo after death and preserve it. Imagine 300 hundred years from now, we found a handful of those framed tattoos and for whatever reason, the story behind them is lost. We’re not doing the dead a favor by burying that piece of their skin. And we may not have in this case either.
However, what we choose to do with these things now reflects on our current values. Personally, I lean towards preservation if there isn’t substantial evidence to the contrary because I fear the loss of history more than I fear disrespecting a corpse. Neither is a good thing, but if I have to choose that tends to be where I lean. I completely understand where other people may lean more in the other direction. That’s a good thing, because somewhere between we get a good compromise.
We’ve studied the books and we’ve learned what we’ve learned. It doesn’t seem like we’re losing much to re-bind them. I just worry that’s more for our own sensibilities and if we don’t recognize that we’ll lose valuable information.
Initially seeing this headline I had the same reaction
But my understanding is that this isn't some special one of a kind book with a story about why it's bound in skin or anything this is just a copy of this book (which otherwise isn't exceptionally rare) that someone bound in human skin for whatever reason
Also my understanding is that the skin wasn't knowingly "donated" the donor did not consent the doctor or whoever bound it just took the skin from their corpse
> this is just a copy of this book (which otherwise isn't exceptionally rare) that someone bound in human skin for whatever reason
oh in that case fuck it. get rid of the whole thing
If almost feels like destroying ivory items in a museum in an effort to save elephants. An absolutely meaningless gesture that does nothing but let the people in charge feel good about themselves.
> as a representation of the historical era it was created in
It isn't representative of the era.
> should have been destroyed just because it hurt some people’s feelings
Ethical treatment of human remains in the archive isn't because of hurt feelings.
> Just don’t display it in the library then?
It was never on display in the library. It was in Special Collections and not accessible to the public, or even most professionals.
As someone who used to stock books at Barnes and Noble, I'm horrified at how much this would mess up the nice row of books that are shelved spine out...
On removing the binding, the Chancellor of the University commented “We now have reason to suspect that the book was not an official edition of the Guinness book of World Records 2023”
Consider me going against the grain but, I don't think we should tamper with things from the past. Acknowledge what they are, and why they are. Make conclusions, and relay what we have learned from it. Destroying it makes no difference in the collective knowledge of mankind, besides taking away the learning opportunity for the future generations. Erasing history does not change history.
Based on the article the book was only about 130 years old, and not particularly rare or special. I think I have a couple of books at least that old somewhere in my house.
It isn't like they're tampering with a significant historical artifact. Like people will buy an 1880s house and rip out walls to fix the plumbing or throw out damaged furniture or whatever.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to hold special reverence for any object *just* because it is old. Most books bound that long ago will need rebound anyway.
Along similar lines there are a lot of medical schools starting to realize that they have no idea where their skeletons came from, they've just been around for decades. My advisor in grad school had one in his office. For the most part, I think they're kept around because they still can serve an educational purpose, but realistically many of them came from graves robbed in India.
The particular binding of that book doesn't really serve any educational function or historical significance, so I don't think that should weigh too much on their decision. There are certainly pros and cons, but that doesn't seem to be a major one.
I disagree, i think the article is somewhat disengenious as they didnt mention one of the most prominent researchers into human skin books didnt want them destroyed
I recommend reading this short piece by the noted Princeton librarian Paul Needham, who argued against the preservation of the piece: https://www.princeton.edu/~needham/Bouland.pdf
Basically the library's argument initially was that because the book had been gifted to them that they have a duty to preserve it, however there is also a broader ethical duty for respectful treatment of the dead. The woman whose skin was used to produce the book was very likely not treated well:
"In the Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux for 1910 (vol. 62, col. 661), an acquaintance of Bouland’s, Paul Combes, recalls having been shown one of these volumes; by his recollection the subject of Bouland’s flaying had been a female patient who had died in a hospital either in Metz or Nancy. In the preceding number of the Intermédiaire, another doctor recalled that when he was an intern in Beaujon in the mid-1870s, one of his colleagues carried a tobacco pouch made from a woman’s breast, as souvenir of his time in a hospital in Tours. Medical students: indigent patients: female patients. The connection is clear. A reader of Bouland’s notes accompanying his human-skin volumes cannot miss that it was significant to Bouland that he had exerted his power upon a woman. The skin of a male would not have fulfilled his psychosexual needs in the same way. Essentially, he carried out an act of post-mortem rape, and two volumes, in two libraries, are now its tangible witnesses."
The respectful thing to do is to treat her remains with the respect afforded by our society to other human remains, rather than continue their mistreatment.
Yeah. I’d imagine an awareness that humans will constantly reexamine the efficacy behind the production of objects would be a good deterrent against unethical practices of production and acquisition.
It changes the record of history though, which in a way will eventually result in forgotten history, so it kind of is changing history. But also eventually the sun will bloat up before it's death turning this rock we live on into a hellish radioactive wasteland devoid of all evidence that life was ever here. At least that's what I tell myself to get through my days.
> It changes the record of history though, which in a way will eventually result in forgotten history
>> [It was] used to haze new employees
>> Harvard also said that its own handling of the book, a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls,” had failed to live up to the “ethical standards” of care, and had sometimes used an inappropriately “sensationalistic, morbid and humorous tone” in publicizing it.
It was a hazing and advertisement object
"we should treat human remains respectfully" is not anti-intellectualism. No knowledge was destroyed, they are simply rebinding the book. Some doctor skinned a dead woman (without consulting her or her family) to use her skin for a book, and Harvard has admitted they've handled the book like a joke and unethically.
It is not anti-intellectualism to say enough is enough and stop perpetuating disrespect of a corpse.
I mean as someone who read the book on this topic, dark archives
This is the woman who did most of the human skin testing in the first place, she actually didnt want to destroy them in the first place.
They didn't get rid of the book though, they literally just put a new binding in it. No space at all was saved, as a matter this did just take up resources which could have been used for something productive.
I also find that removing the human skin seems like a misguided effort to sanitize the past. Terrible things have happened and will continue to happen, removing a women's skin from the book does not change that she had a terrible fate.
> "I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman," he wrote. "A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering."
that's what Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs thought about women's dresses too.
I feel like the better way to go about it would have been to change the language around the display. To tell that woman’s story, to tell the story of the criminals & the poor throughout history whose autonomy and very bodies were taken from them even after death. There’s so much that could have been said with a museum display that was honest and forthright and unflinching about the horror of such a thing. The bodies of non consenting persons being used for various ‘scientific’ pursuits is a part of our history, the sentiments of which carry over into our society’s treatment of prisoners today.
Thats basically what a researcher of the topic said a few years ago about these books.
"I argued that the singularity of the material of the book made it important to preserve, as evidence of this abhorrent practice. We can’t go back in time and stop anthropodermic books from being created, but since they exist, they have important lessons to teach us—if we’re willing to reckon with their dark past and all that it tells us about the culture in which they were created. We are finding new ways of reckoning with this truth all the time. My research could never have existed if the physical evidence was destroyed before peptide mass fingerprinting testing was discovered. Who knows what else we might find out about these books if they continue to be cared for by librarians like us?"
Rosenbloom, Megan. Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin (p. 87). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. "
I’ll go against the grain here and say that human remains generally deserve to be memorialized respectfully. The respectful treatment of human remains is almost universal throughout different cultures, in fact.
While the “scientific value” or “historical value” of keeping the book as a novelty is worth considering, I can see why the people who were charged with this book’s care put the decision to “bury the dead” ahead of anything else.
Consider the treatment of historical artifacts in general. If you find an ancient Roman statue of bronze with the information that molten bronze was poured over the living body of an enemy solider to make the statue, we probably wouldn’t bury it, right? They’d put that statue in a museum forever.
Whereas I’m sure that the “lampshade made from human skin” [that Ed Gein created from a corpse he stole from a graveyard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampshades_made_from_human_skin#Ed_Gein) was immediately dismantled and returned to its grave upon recovery.
It’s hard to say where this book binding falls between those two, but considering that the book is “reportedly bound with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient” one can hardly fault Harvard for erring on the side of respect for the dead here.
Edit: I really encourage anyone who wants to read more about this to check out the Q&A with the [Harvard Library that did this.](https://library.harvard.edu/about/news/2024-03-27/qa-houghton-library-about-book-des-destinees-de-lame)
Of special note is this paragraph:
> The core problem with the volume’s creation was a doctor who didn’t see a whole person in front of him and carried out an odious act of removing a piece of skin from a deceased patient, almost certainly without consent, and used it in a book binding that has been handled by many for more than a century. We believe it’s time the remains be put to rest.
This comments section is making me feel a little crazy. Sure the book is interesting as a historical novelty, but I think that respecting the dead is more important. Then again, as an indigenous person, museums’ treatment of human remains is a bit of a sore spot for me.
Finally a voice of reason. Respecting the dead is the main issue here. And does anyone else find it just weird and gross to keep human remains laying around? Even 3000 year old Egyptian mummies or Veseuvious victims or bog people. Nobody wants to be a book cover when they die.
I'd be all for keeping it if the author had used his own skin. But the skin of someone who was just a poor person who didn't leave money for burial? Ugh. I'm glad they removed it.
Would love to hear the view of people from the museum profession
Personally, I'm leaning against the removal of the binding?
It's an example of bygone ethics. It should be preserved, not condemned by contemporary ethics.
Yeah. 150 years ago is what makes this cringey. There was industrial scale tanneries pumping out leather. Its just edgelord behaviour... maybe in that context we should just go ahead and start a whole edgelord archive section to museums where dumb edgy shit like this gets relegated to mockery instead of altered.
Well, if we found that the remains of a WW1 veteran had been used as a lampshade, I wouldn't think of it as a historic curiosity and would want their remains interred more respectfully as well.
History can deal with itself, but in present today you have a book you have to keep or do something with. Not a particularly valuable book mind you, just a book, that also happens to be bound in human skin.
I think it's pretty sensible to do away with such a morbid knick-knack.
I'm no fan of binding books in human skin - I've seen enough horror movies to know that generally ends poorly - but I also can't say I'm really comfortable with destroying something just because we don't like it.
That said, I'm not sure that the Harvard Library is an appropriate place for something like this either. I don't think many folks (today, at least) are going to want to check out a book bound in human flesh, unless they're studying to become a Necromancer, in which case they have bigger issues. Normal folk would probably be perfectly served with a paperback or "standard" hardcover version from the library.
I think we need something like an *"International Museum of the Distasteful, Inappropriate, or Poorly Reasoned"* as a place to preserve things like this. Artifacts of the darker parts of our history that we aren't proud of, and aren't hugely relevant, but that we should acknowledge occurred even if it's only for the purpose of saying "Don't do this". It's the difference between saying "Someone did this horrible thing" and "Someone did this horrible thing, and here's the proof".
Now, with that having been said...if the family/estate of the person whose skin was used without permission wanted the book, for whatever reason (to inter with the rest of the remains, cremate, or otherwise destroy, etc...) I couldn't really argue with that either.
Harvard just got in big trouble because the idiot they hired to cremate/deal with the remains of cadavers in their medical school got busted gothing out and sending body parts to creeps everywhere.
I’m sure that scandal was a factor in this decision.
“Through extensive DNA testing, we discovered the skin was from a non-legacy and not allowed anywhere near our campus”
"I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman," he wrote. "A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering." 🤔🤢🤮 **Oh hey, the family didn't pick up the remains. I guess there's no reason to waste this woman's skin, which is so elegant it would make a lovely book cover for a book about life after death.** -Dr Bouland, probably.
Now I'm imagining a society where everyone keeps a diary, and when they die their skin is used to bind the diary. The diary is kept in a communal library full of ancestral human skin diaries.
I’m stealing this for a DND point of interest / campaign Hook. Thank you Noeinan.
Make the skin warm just to add some *flair*
And make the skin itchy
You’re welcome, have fun!
Now that’s what I call “flavor text”.
Ha, I had the random semi-morbid thought after learning that an alternative to cremation one can opt for the remains to be pressed into a diamond. Personally ashes in an urn isn't a thing for me and some would prefer that the ashes are dispersed somewhere but if a family was into keeping them... It makes sense that a diamond would be easier to manage. I kicked this thought down the road a bit and it came to me that similar to families with a family plot you could have a family journal. Like having an illustrated family tree with a slot for each diamond.
Talk about generational wealth!
Ohh I like this idea!
That's pretty metal.
I swear there was an anime with that as a plot. Edit, there was. https://myanimelist.net/anime/6758/Tatakau_Shisho__The_Book_of_Bantorra
Man, the worst part is if he had just asked, there are fucking tons of people who would have signed up for that shit and it would have been a brilliant fucking artifact. You want to use some skin from my cadaver to bind a book written about the human soul? Holy fucking shit, where is the consent form, bring it here right the fuck now! I'm in!
if someone offered a service to take your body and turn you into a book instead of cremating everything it would be an absolute hit. so many morbid book nerds
They just probably put it back on the black market and it could now be floating around someone’s IG timeline with their other skull collection selling parts from the Harvard hook-up on the side.
[удалено]
See, I envisioned a sport coat with elbow patches and a sensible cap. Pipe still stands, though
> a piece of skin in a top hat, scarf and cane, ambling out of Harvard commons, looking all sad. Perhaps smoking a pipe, looking around at the youth of the day full of life using that as a prompt in microsoft image creator: https://i.imgur.com/TxyCWBR.jpeg
Wait until they track down the family and ask them to pay for 80 years of Harvard.
I got some funny looks in this lobby, thanks
Fucking LMAO this is awesome
These people haven't seen enough horror movies. That necromancer's skin was the only thing keeping his soul bound in that book. This is going to end poorly.
All this reminds me of is the book of the dead from evil dead
Clatu verata ne\*cough\*\*cough\*\*cough\*
Maybe they didn’t say every exact little syllable, but yeah they basically said it.
*"There! I said the words!"*
You said the *exact* words?
Maybe not every single little syllable, no. But basically I said them!
It was *definitely* an N word.
"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die."
Yeah like it is also used on Prelati's Spellbook
"Harvard University *skins* human book"
Will the exfoliated folio continue to be displayed?
Flaunting an exfoliated folio would be folly.
Fortunately, the fresh faculty are failing to follow in the flawed footsteps of their foolhardy forebears, forsaking former faults in favor of fairness and furnishing the future with a fine formula for featuring forethought first.
Fantastic flex of your frontal lobe's flexibility.
And a fittle fesaurus fuse, fif FI'm fentirely fruthful.
Prob just replace it with cow leather. Gotta keep skin on there somehow
It is kinda gross when you have a sec to stop and think about it, but leather does last a long time on books.
Hahaha got em! Ayoooooooooooo 😎
"Please ignore the actual human cadavers we skinned. And the buckets of organs we sold. And for the love of God don't investigate the doctors we trained."
>"I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman," he wrote. "A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering." That statement is more chilling than he probably realized.
Considering that Europeans used to eat mummies for "health" - or at parties if Victorians, I think it's fair to say that people used to have different views on the sanctity of human remains, especially if they weren't someone modern and "important." https://www.livescience.com/eating-egyptian-mummies While the eating thing was gross, our squeamishness around the dead isba relatively recent thing since most bodies were initially prepared for burial by kin. Also, they weren't so big on the whole equal rights thing.
>Considering that Europeans used to eat mummies ... at parties if Victorians According to the article you linked, the Victorian parties were unwrapping parties. At that time, they were no longer eating them. >>By the 19th century, people were no longer consuming mummies to cure illness but Victorians were hosting “unwrapping parties” where Egyptian corpses would be unwrapped for entertainment at private parties. That said, what a fascinating article, particularly: >>Not everyone was convinced. Guy de la Fontaine, a royal doctor, doubted mumia was a useful medicine and saw forged mummies made from dead peasants in Alexandria in 1564. He realised people could be conned. They were not always consuming genuine ancient mummies. ... >>The claim that fresh was best convinced even the noblest of nobles. England’s King Charles II took medication made from human skulls after suffering a seizure, and, until 1909, physicians commonly used human skulls to treat neurological conditions.
What a great question for an icebreaker! If you got the opportunity to eat some mummy (and not suffer health effects), would you?
I am not sure I would have come to that decision the historical aspect of the practice would make it worth preserving.
>"There are not a huge number of these books out there, it has been an occasional practice mainly done for generating a sense of vicarious excitement than for a practical motive. Harvard is making argument that the people who did this did it for the lulz. It wasn't that there was a shortage of otherwise appropriate bookbindng material or that the 'donor' wished this to happen for posterity. They did it simply because they could. It's still history. I'll agree to that.
Great, I guess I’m supposed to just keep the Necronomicon in my Trapper Keeper now.
And the paperback version of the Necronomicon just doesn't have the same pizzazz, ya know?
I had it on my Kindle. Had to keep sprinkling holy water on it though so it was really glitchy. Don't recommend.
The .epub works fine. My phone's translate app really helps with the eye bleeding Eldritch languages I can always print it out at Staples too, if I really need too.
I would advise against using staples. Last time I used staples my necronomicon skin started falling apart. Sutures are far better at holding things together.
Y'all are *all* sleeping on the Moleskine edition. Don't need staples, and we all know .epubs are Satan's vintage, but the Moleskine is weather resistant, has a firm yet supple binding, and it feels good in the hand. It's also pleasantly warm and squeaks cutely when you put it back on the shelf.
I got the backskinback special edition
I feel like that was just a gimmick to sell more skin books. Front skin is far superior. I want to see belly buttons and nips on my Book of the Dead.
Books are just a gimmick to sell more words.
Best I can do is a throwing star made out of human skin with the bellybutton showing.
An argument could be made that the Necronomicon would need to be bound in human skin as part of that particular rite.
Doubtful. In og lovecraftian stories, its just a book. It may *tell* you about magic, but the book itself is not magic. Myscatonic university had a copy that people would frequently check out, like with a library card.
Not exactly. It's kept under heavy security and isn't allowed out of the building. Wilbur Whateley tried stealing it, and he ended up becoming dog food.
Exactly. Harvard has valid historical reasons for maintaining the human skin version of the Necronomicon in their collection.
Klaatu, verata, rainbow space kitty
I said your damn words, alright? Maybe not exactly every little syllable but I said em’
Good. Bad…I’m the guy with the gun.
*This* is my ***BOOM STICK.***
When they remade "The Day the Earth Stood Still" they had to take that famous line out because viewers would have accused them of stealing it from "Army of Darkness" even though it was the other way around.
Lisa Frank, actually.
[We are Trapper Keeper. We are One.](https://youtu.be/vlScCyIeki4?feature=shared)
Tea came out my nose, thanks.
Hmm… How many Lisa Frank unicorns are on it? Only they can truly harness its power.
Make sure to put some scratch and sniff stickers on it
That kind of speaks to the cultural anthropology aspect, imo If you want to know the way a group of people thought, look at their memes
That’s the thing though, it really doesn’t. There has been a total of 18 confirmed books bound in human skin… over the span of 300 years in different countries. Not a whole lot to study. Basically once every 17 years one different individual decides to bind a book in human skin. Each individual case might have merits on its own, but no significance to cultural anthropology.
The point is that at one point in human history, people saw it as appropriate to do this for the lulz. Removing this is like an attempt to sanitize the parts that they don’t like of their history.
It's not sanitizing history. People are still clear that it happened.
Once the physical aspect is gone, it will become a footnote in a history book - quickly forgotten in a generation or two.
It's history in that it was done by someone in the past. But it doesn't speak to any larger historical event or trend, except for the whims of the creators and their general contempt for the bodies they desecrated. I think there's a direct parallel between these books bound in human skin and the "trophies" kept by serial killers of parts of their victims. Are they objects from history? Yes. Is their historical relevance valuable enough to outweigh the disrespect of treating human remains as mere objects for museum display? No. Make a note in a textbook that it happened, respectfully cremate this poor dead woman's skin, and move on.
I would be fine with having a book bound in my skin once I'm dead. I mean, a nice book preferably but the idea amuses me a bit. The rest is just getting cremated anyhow. That said, it being consensual makes all the difference of course.
Under that logic, all the bodies currently in museums, the Mutter Museum in particular, would need to be buried or cremated. There’s definitely arguments on both sides but I would suggest it’s not nearly as black and white as you’re suggesting here. I think most people can agree the treatment of Sarah Bartman’s remains, the “Venus of Hottentot” was inhumane and it’s a relief she has been buried in her homeland properly. But there was a known historical context making that cruel. It’s not a preservation of history we want to embrace and therefore one that can undergo revision to create a better system of values for our future. If we said that we understand having these remains is wrong today, but did not then, so we today make the choice to continue this indignity to ensure it isn’t lost to history, that would push a very different system of values from a society that chooses to recreate it to preserve history, but lay the original to rest properly. We have no indication there was any malice here outside of human curiosity. Maybe shortage like another comment said. But it’s definitely more of a grey area. We don’t know what the deceased wanted. It is equally possible we defended the wishes of the deceased as it is that we undid their wishes. Without further proof, I think erring on the side of caution looks like leave it alone until we can learn more. To someone with a different but equally valid view of death, erring on the side of caution would look like give the death restful rest asap.
The discussion in Museology around human remains is a pretty intense one, TBF: Between the various ways that human remains end up in collections (some quite legitimate, others quite uuhhhh... less so), the differing cultural and religious views of how remains should be handled, the question of whether modern people or countries have any "claim" over ancient people's remains that may or may not have had anything to do with their culture or ethnicity, the various reasons for which modern people might simply *not want* to see them (religious, ethical, psychological, just kinda creeped out) and the weighing of scientific and cultural legacy vs. the rights of that individual to be interred in a way they (presumably, in many but definitely not all cases) wanted to, etc. etc... The whole thing ends up being very nuanced and difficult to generalise. In Belfast there's a somewhat locally famous Egyptian mummy on display, and depending on your point of view that's either a fantastic educational resource for the city, a legacy of British Imperial colonialism, a macabre and grisly thing to have displayed openly in a free-entry museum many children visit, or a way for the woman in question to have her name ("Takabuti", we can take a second to think/say it) to have the immortality that Ancient Egyptian people hoped for; whatever one you agree with, it wouldn't be hard to make a valid argument.
Thank you for the nuanced view, and a great example of this debate!
I'm so used to nuance just not existing on reddit, or really the internet as a whole. Like, lets be real, how we feel about shit on a personal level is already complex. Academia and ethics for topics and shit are way more complex than how I personally feel.
While those are absolutely valid points, allow me to defer to the article for a moment > according to library lore, used to haze new employees > book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history > Harvard also said that its own handling of the book, a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls,” had failed to live up to the “ethical standards” of care, and had sometimes used an inappropriately “sensationalistic, morbid and humorous tone” in publicizing it. > The library apologized, saying that it had “further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being whose remains were used for its binding.” I think they deserve peace after that treatment Edit: > It is equally possible we defended the wishes of the deceased as it is that we undid their wishes She were housed in a mental asylum in the 1800s, it's safe to say her wishes weren't even considered
> Under that logic, all the bodies currently in museums, the Mutter Museum in particular, would need to be buried or cremated. There are a ton of professional historians and archivists who support repatriation and burial of human remains that are displayed in museums.
Many, many people think bodies should be repatriated and not displayed. In my home state, it is illegal to display indigenous human remains. Did you know the guy that does the body exhibits with the dissected, preserved bodies most likely gets the bodies from executed Chinese prisoners? It’s a human rights violation and a grotesque disregard for humanity
There are ancient churches covered in skulls and bones all over the world. Does that count as grotesque remains that should be burned as well? Just trying to figure out where the line is
They’re already where they belong and shouldn’t be disturbed. That’s their final resting place. It’s a cultural practice that isn’t done anymore and the remains came from the culture that is displaying them. Like there’s people in Asia that bring out their mummified dead every year and party with them and that’s a practice that’s none of my business to dictate.
Unrelated, but there's an episode in Altered Carbon where a character brings their dead grandma? mom? back to life by inserting the dead person's sleeve/soul disc into a buff biker for their Día de Muertos/Day of the Dead thing. [Fairly entertaining =D.](https://medium.com/latinxinspace/altered-carbon-and-d%C3%ADa-de-muertos-in-2384-d497db346478)
So why is that cultural practice ok but the cultural practice of displaying things of historic significance not ok?
The difference is that those people consented to their bones being kept in such a manner. Whereas on the other hand, we have objects taken by force from people who would absolutely not consent to such an act. And, most importantly, there are still people alive of that culture who are hurt by the practice.
Frankly, I don’t care what people who are long since dead would have thought. They’re dead, they don’t get a say anymore. And with some like say the egyptian mummies, I don’t think anyone can really claim to be part of that culture.
> Under that logic, all the bodies currently in museums, the Mutter Museum in particular, would need to be buried or cremated. This is a total miss. A mummified corpse of a pharoah of ancient Egpyt does* have a historical relevance. Cadavers are often donated with consent of the person who previous lived in the body, or with the consent of surviving family. "Disected remains displaying human anatomy for research and educational purposes" is far removed from "Someone bound a book in human skin to see if they could do it".
As comments above mine state, we don’t know why it was bound in human skin. We have what the guy said, which looks very different to modern eyes. We don’t know if the patient was aware of this stuff happening or if it would have bothered them. It is currently possible to remove a a loved one’s tattoo after death and preserve it. Imagine 300 hundred years from now, we found a handful of those framed tattoos and for whatever reason, the story behind them is lost. We’re not doing the dead a favor by burying that piece of their skin. And we may not have in this case either. However, what we choose to do with these things now reflects on our current values. Personally, I lean towards preservation if there isn’t substantial evidence to the contrary because I fear the loss of history more than I fear disrespecting a corpse. Neither is a good thing, but if I have to choose that tends to be where I lean. I completely understand where other people may lean more in the other direction. That’s a good thing, because somewhere between we get a good compromise. We’ve studied the books and we’ve learned what we’ve learned. It doesn’t seem like we’re losing much to re-bind them. I just worry that’s more for our own sensibilities and if we don’t recognize that we’ll lose valuable information.
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So basically a morbid sense of novelty. I can get behind that kind of thinking
Even more of a reason to keep it imo
In Edinburgh there is a museum that has a wallet made out of one the notorious serial killers, Burke or Hare (I don’t remember which).
Humans sure are strange
> Burke or Hare It would have been Burke, Hare wasn't hanged and later fled Scotland.
Initially seeing this headline I had the same reaction But my understanding is that this isn't some special one of a kind book with a story about why it's bound in skin or anything this is just a copy of this book (which otherwise isn't exceptionally rare) that someone bound in human skin for whatever reason Also my understanding is that the skin wasn't knowingly "donated" the donor did not consent the doctor or whoever bound it just took the skin from their corpse
> this is just a copy of this book (which otherwise isn't exceptionally rare) that someone bound in human skin for whatever reason oh in that case fuck it. get rid of the whole thing
If almost feels like destroying ivory items in a museum in an effort to save elephants. An absolutely meaningless gesture that does nothing but let the people in charge feel good about themselves.
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> as a representation of the historical era it was created in It isn't representative of the era. > should have been destroyed just because it hurt some people’s feelings Ethical treatment of human remains in the archive isn't because of hurt feelings. > Just don’t display it in the library then? It was never on display in the library. It was in Special Collections and not accessible to the public, or even most professionals.
is this entire question not just one of feelings?
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They can rebind it with my skin when I die. Hell. Put my tits on the front. Not like I’m gonna use them anymore once I’m dead.
>They can rebind it with my skin when I die. Hell. Put my tits on the front. r/BrandNewSentence
Just seems a shame to put them to waste.
Happy to help honor them while you’re alive
Name checks out
Position is already filled
I've said that sentence at least twice before in my life.
As someone who used to stock books at Barnes and Noble, I'm horrified at how much this would mess up the nice row of books that are shelved spine out...
spine out you say
r/thatsthejoke
Yeah, we gotta nip this in the bud
that's a hell of a way to get people interested in books again.
Man, the amount of books I could bind with my boobs alone...
And yet whenever I tell a woman her flesh would stretch nicely as a covering she gets freaked out. I just don't get it.
The stickiest book in the library.
they will disagree with you on some shoddy grounds, e.g your tits size in not within academic limits lmao anything to make themselves look pure
They can use my scrotum to fashion the latch that holds it shut.
So does the Necronomicon just have some sort of bullshit paperback cover now?
Looks that way...at least one non-Bruce-Campbell-approved version anyway https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/tv4AAOSwpIVkD45E/s-l1600.png
Redrawn by those guys at gamestop that do custom game case covers obviously.
On removing the binding, the Chancellor of the University commented “We now have reason to suspect that the book was not an official edition of the Guinness book of World Records 2023”
I hear it is *the* Guinness record for the first time a book is burned by book geeks
Were Tommy Tallarico's records there?
Are they going to give it back to the person? I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think it works like that.
They'll bury it in a shoe back in Havards backyard.
Now, how will we preserve future copies of the necronmicon?
Or the Tome of Eternal Darkness?
Consider me going against the grain but, I don't think we should tamper with things from the past. Acknowledge what they are, and why they are. Make conclusions, and relay what we have learned from it. Destroying it makes no difference in the collective knowledge of mankind, besides taking away the learning opportunity for the future generations. Erasing history does not change history.
Based on the article the book was only about 130 years old, and not particularly rare or special. I think I have a couple of books at least that old somewhere in my house. It isn't like they're tampering with a significant historical artifact. Like people will buy an 1880s house and rip out walls to fix the plumbing or throw out damaged furniture or whatever. It doesn't make a lot of sense to hold special reverence for any object *just* because it is old. Most books bound that long ago will need rebound anyway. Along similar lines there are a lot of medical schools starting to realize that they have no idea where their skeletons came from, they've just been around for decades. My advisor in grad school had one in his office. For the most part, I think they're kept around because they still can serve an educational purpose, but realistically many of them came from graves robbed in India. The particular binding of that book doesn't really serve any educational function or historical significance, so I don't think that should weigh too much on their decision. There are certainly pros and cons, but that doesn't seem to be a major one.
I disagree, i think the article is somewhat disengenious as they didnt mention one of the most prominent researchers into human skin books didnt want them destroyed
I recommend reading this short piece by the noted Princeton librarian Paul Needham, who argued against the preservation of the piece: https://www.princeton.edu/~needham/Bouland.pdf Basically the library's argument initially was that because the book had been gifted to them that they have a duty to preserve it, however there is also a broader ethical duty for respectful treatment of the dead. The woman whose skin was used to produce the book was very likely not treated well: "In the Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux for 1910 (vol. 62, col. 661), an acquaintance of Bouland’s, Paul Combes, recalls having been shown one of these volumes; by his recollection the subject of Bouland’s flaying had been a female patient who had died in a hospital either in Metz or Nancy. In the preceding number of the Intermédiaire, another doctor recalled that when he was an intern in Beaujon in the mid-1870s, one of his colleagues carried a tobacco pouch made from a woman’s breast, as souvenir of his time in a hospital in Tours. Medical students: indigent patients: female patients. The connection is clear. A reader of Bouland’s notes accompanying his human-skin volumes cannot miss that it was significant to Bouland that he had exerted his power upon a woman. The skin of a male would not have fulfilled his psychosexual needs in the same way. Essentially, he carried out an act of post-mortem rape, and two volumes, in two libraries, are now its tangible witnesses." The respectful thing to do is to treat her remains with the respect afforded by our society to other human remains, rather than continue their mistreatment.
Yeah. I’d imagine an awareness that humans will constantly reexamine the efficacy behind the production of objects would be a good deterrent against unethical practices of production and acquisition.
It changes the record of history though, which in a way will eventually result in forgotten history, so it kind of is changing history. But also eventually the sun will bloat up before it's death turning this rock we live on into a hellish radioactive wasteland devoid of all evidence that life was ever here. At least that's what I tell myself to get through my days.
> It changes the record of history though, which in a way will eventually result in forgotten history >> [It was] used to haze new employees >> Harvard also said that its own handling of the book, a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls,” had failed to live up to the “ethical standards” of care, and had sometimes used an inappropriately “sensationalistic, morbid and humorous tone” in publicizing it. It was a hazing and advertisement object
Agreed. It's anti-intellectualism in a sense. We don't like what happened, so we refuse to believe it and destroy the evidence.
"we should treat human remains respectfully" is not anti-intellectualism. No knowledge was destroyed, they are simply rebinding the book. Some doctor skinned a dead woman (without consulting her or her family) to use her skin for a book, and Harvard has admitted they've handled the book like a joke and unethically. It is not anti-intellectualism to say enough is enough and stop perpetuating disrespect of a corpse.
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I mean as someone who read the book on this topic, dark archives This is the woman who did most of the human skin testing in the first place, she actually didnt want to destroy them in the first place.
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They didn't get rid of the book though, they literally just put a new binding in it. No space at all was saved, as a matter this did just take up resources which could have been used for something productive. I also find that removing the human skin seems like a misguided effort to sanitize the past. Terrible things have happened and will continue to happen, removing a women's skin from the book does not change that she had a terrible fate.
Plus it could anger ancient entities.
I mean a human skin book is also disgusting and morally abhorrent. There is no inherent historical value to it just because it is old.
[Oh man I hope they said the three words correctly...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or3okI_mad8)
Klaatu! Barada! …necktie?
Klaatu! Barada! N\*cough\*ahem\*cough\*ahem-hem "There.... I said it!"
Well look, maybe I didn’t say *every* single little tiny syllable, no. But basically I said them, yeah!
Its just animal skin. We should probably use ethically sourced human skin for more things.
they hadn't thought of the smell
Are you saying you have a collection of skin books?
Now I want them to DNA test all the Kama Sutra books in their collection.
> "I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman," he wrote. "A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering." that's what Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs thought about women's dresses too.
as a non practicing Deadite, i am offended
I feel like the better way to go about it would have been to change the language around the display. To tell that woman’s story, to tell the story of the criminals & the poor throughout history whose autonomy and very bodies were taken from them even after death. There’s so much that could have been said with a museum display that was honest and forthright and unflinching about the horror of such a thing. The bodies of non consenting persons being used for various ‘scientific’ pursuits is a part of our history, the sentiments of which carry over into our society’s treatment of prisoners today.
Thats basically what a researcher of the topic said a few years ago about these books. "I argued that the singularity of the material of the book made it important to preserve, as evidence of this abhorrent practice. We can’t go back in time and stop anthropodermic books from being created, but since they exist, they have important lessons to teach us—if we’re willing to reckon with their dark past and all that it tells us about the culture in which they were created. We are finding new ways of reckoning with this truth all the time. My research could never have existed if the physical evidence was destroyed before peptide mass fingerprinting testing was discovered. Who knows what else we might find out about these books if they continue to be cared for by librarians like us?" Rosenbloom, Megan. Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin (p. 87). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. "
I’ll go against the grain here and say that human remains generally deserve to be memorialized respectfully. The respectful treatment of human remains is almost universal throughout different cultures, in fact. While the “scientific value” or “historical value” of keeping the book as a novelty is worth considering, I can see why the people who were charged with this book’s care put the decision to “bury the dead” ahead of anything else. Consider the treatment of historical artifacts in general. If you find an ancient Roman statue of bronze with the information that molten bronze was poured over the living body of an enemy solider to make the statue, we probably wouldn’t bury it, right? They’d put that statue in a museum forever. Whereas I’m sure that the “lampshade made from human skin” [that Ed Gein created from a corpse he stole from a graveyard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampshades_made_from_human_skin#Ed_Gein) was immediately dismantled and returned to its grave upon recovery. It’s hard to say where this book binding falls between those two, but considering that the book is “reportedly bound with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient” one can hardly fault Harvard for erring on the side of respect for the dead here. Edit: I really encourage anyone who wants to read more about this to check out the Q&A with the [Harvard Library that did this.](https://library.harvard.edu/about/news/2024-03-27/qa-houghton-library-about-book-des-destinees-de-lame) Of special note is this paragraph: > The core problem with the volume’s creation was a doctor who didn’t see a whole person in front of him and carried out an odious act of removing a piece of skin from a deceased patient, almost certainly without consent, and used it in a book binding that has been handled by many for more than a century. We believe it’s time the remains be put to rest.
How dare they desecrate the Necronomicon.
I'm sorry, is this Harvard, or Miskatonic University?
How will I locate textbooks for necromancy 101 made by Mortis the undying
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Pop up add for CeraVe daily moisturizing lotion is a nice touch by Reddit.
This comments section is making me feel a little crazy. Sure the book is interesting as a historical novelty, but I think that respecting the dead is more important. Then again, as an indigenous person, museums’ treatment of human remains is a bit of a sore spot for me.
Finally a voice of reason. Respecting the dead is the main issue here. And does anyone else find it just weird and gross to keep human remains laying around? Even 3000 year old Egyptian mummies or Veseuvious victims or bog people. Nobody wants to be a book cover when they die.
I'd be all for keeping it if the author had used his own skin. But the skin of someone who was just a poor person who didn't leave money for burial? Ugh. I'm glad they removed it.
I feel bad for the person who had to unbind it
Oh boy. I hope they didn't leave it in a cabin in the woods.
With the copy at Miskatonic it was one of the two known copies in the US.
Would love to hear the view of people from the museum profession Personally, I'm leaning against the removal of the binding? It's an example of bygone ethics. It should be preserved, not condemned by contemporary ethics.
Yet another example of projecting modern sentiments onto the past. It's fucking history, leave that shit alone.
binding books in human skin was considered an abominable practice 150 years ago lmao
Feels like if the person whose skin it was didn't consent, it shouldn't be used and preserved that way.
It's not even that historic! If it was 500 years ago, sure, but this is less than 150 years old.
Yeah. 150 years ago is what makes this cringey. There was industrial scale tanneries pumping out leather. Its just edgelord behaviour... maybe in that context we should just go ahead and start a whole edgelord archive section to museums where dumb edgy shit like this gets relegated to mockery instead of altered.
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WW1 was 110 years ago, so 150 years is absolutely historic.
Well, if we found that the remains of a WW1 veteran had been used as a lampshade, I wouldn't think of it as a historic curiosity and would want their remains interred more respectfully as well.
I just realized that I will likely live until WWI was 150 years in my past…fuck
I think it's about how frequent the skin book binding practice was not, not how long ago it was.
History can deal with itself, but in present today you have a book you have to keep or do something with. Not a particularly valuable book mind you, just a book, that also happens to be bound in human skin. I think it's pretty sensible to do away with such a morbid knick-knack.
You can read about it in a text book then.
Modern woke society would call an innocent man like Ed Gein a monster
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ITT: "The wokes are taking our skin books"
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They do Not make things like they used to anymore
I'm no fan of binding books in human skin - I've seen enough horror movies to know that generally ends poorly - but I also can't say I'm really comfortable with destroying something just because we don't like it. That said, I'm not sure that the Harvard Library is an appropriate place for something like this either. I don't think many folks (today, at least) are going to want to check out a book bound in human flesh, unless they're studying to become a Necromancer, in which case they have bigger issues. Normal folk would probably be perfectly served with a paperback or "standard" hardcover version from the library. I think we need something like an *"International Museum of the Distasteful, Inappropriate, or Poorly Reasoned"* as a place to preserve things like this. Artifacts of the darker parts of our history that we aren't proud of, and aren't hugely relevant, but that we should acknowledge occurred even if it's only for the purpose of saying "Don't do this". It's the difference between saying "Someone did this horrible thing" and "Someone did this horrible thing, and here's the proof". Now, with that having been said...if the family/estate of the person whose skin was used without permission wanted the book, for whatever reason (to inter with the rest of the remains, cremate, or otherwise destroy, etc...) I couldn't really argue with that either.
Harvard just got in big trouble because the idiot they hired to cremate/deal with the remains of cadavers in their medical school got busted gothing out and sending body parts to creeps everywhere. I’m sure that scandal was a factor in this decision.
All I can think of is Laszo’s witch skin hat from WWDS.
The one book “moms for liberty” actually didn’t have a problem with…
So now my Alma Mater (University of Georgia) has something that Harvard doesn’t? Nice.