Harvard removes human skin binding from book after years of showing it off
The survey also highlighted items whose origins lay outside the context of colonialism and slavery, including ancient funerary urns that may contain ashes or bone fragments, early-20th-century dental samples and, at Houghton Library, the Houssaye book.
The book arrived at Harvard in 1934, via US diplomat John Stetson, an heir to the hat fortune. It had been bound by its first owner, Ludovic Bouland, a French doctor, who inserted a handwritten note saying that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering”. A memo from Stetson, according to Houghton, said Bouland had taken the skin from an unknown woman who died in a French psychiatric hospital.
Harvard’s decision follows a pressure campaign led by Paul Needham, a prominent scholar of early modern books, who, as allowed under Harvard’s policies, formed an “affinity group” last May that called for the binding to be removed and the woman’s remains given a proper burial in France. The topic received renewed attention last week when the group released an open letter addressed to Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, which was also published as an advertisement in The Harvard Crimson.
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The letter, signed by Needham and two other leaders of the group, said the library had a history of handling the book “brutishly on a regular basis, as an attention-grabbing, sensationalised display item”. It cited in particular a 2014 blog post about the scientific testing, since removed, which called the research “good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike”.
Treating the skin-bound book as a kind of display “seems to me to violate every conceivable concept of treating human beings with respect”, Needham said in an interview after the announcement. Opting to unbind the book and determine a respectful disposition for it, he added, was the right decision.
In a list of frequently asked questions released with the university’s announcement, Tom Hyry, the director of Houghton, and Anne-Marie Eze, its associate librarian, said the library had first imposed restrictions on access in 2015, and instituted a full moratorium on any new research in February 2023. Now, with the binding removed, the text itself will be fully available to view, both at the library and online.
Hyry and Eze said they expected the process of researching the binding and making a decision about its ultimate disposition would take “months, or perhaps longer”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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