Results: The History Behind Anthropodermic Bibliopegy: Human-Skin Bookbinding---- Books Of Human Flesh (click on the pictures to enlarge) ~~~> :)

Anthropodermic bibliopegy is the practice of binding books in human skin. Beginning in the 17th century, it became fashionable among doctors to bind anatomy texts with the skin of cadavers and for the skin of executed criminals to be used to bind transcripts of their trials. Reaching its peak popularity in the 17th and 18th century, anthropodermic bibliopegy fell out of fashion at the end of the Victorian age. Do these crazy times in history creep you out?

This might happen much more to a convicted criminal however, an individual might request to be memorialized for family or lovers in the form of a book. Would you ever want to be "remembered" in this way, when you die?

Human leather has a different pore size and shape than pig or calf skin, along with a bizarre waxy smell, allowing fraudulent books to be identified. Did you know that the tanning process often destroys DNA traces, so it's hard to identify the "donor?"

Human-skin books have a very expensive price tag of $11,000 dollars, would you be willing to pay for a book like this if you really wanted one, and money was not an issue?

You can see examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy in many university and national libraries. Here's a list of places to see such work: Have you been to any of these places?

If you were to visit one or more of these places to see these books, would you want to touch them?