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Books Bound In Human Skin

Here's an example of an English doctor using human skin to bind a book.


Killer relative still hanging around after 189 years
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ne ... rsity.html

John Horwood skeleton
Macabre ... skeleton in cabinet - complete with hangman's noose

A SHOCKED wife researching her family tree found she was related to a killer - still hanging from a NOOSE.

Gobsmacked Mary Halliwell was furious to discover the skeleton gruesomely displayed in a university cabinet 189 years on.

She launched a battle to be declared legal owner of the remains - and won.

Hanged ... relative Jon Horwood
Hanged ... relative Jon Horwood
Last night she vowed to give the jilted teenager - convicted in 1821 of murdering his ex - a proper burial.

Mary, 67, said: "It will give me peace of mind."

Executed John Horwood was the son of her great-great-great grandfather's brother.

The lad was sentenced to death after spotting sweetheart Eliza Balsom with a new love and lobbing a pebble at her.

She died from an apparently minor head injury after being treated by a surgeon.

Three days after his 18th birthday, Horwood - a miner - was hanged above the gates of New Bristol Gaol.

Dr Richard Smith - the surgeon who treated Eliza by drilling a hole in her head - refused to hand the lad's body to his shattered family.

Mary Halliwell
Horrified ... Mary Halliwell claimed remains

He publicly SKINNED the corpse as he performed a dissection in front of 80 gawpers at Bristol Royal Infirmary.

The surgeon kept the skeleton on show at his house - with the hangman's noose. He used the skin to bind a book about the case after having it tanned.

Mary, of Leigh, Lancs, who tracked the body to Bristol University, said: "I'm angry a human being could do something so barbaric to another person."

The "Book of Skin" is currently kept at the Bristol Records Office.

Last night the skeleton was at a chapel of rest in the city. Mary and husband David, 66, plan to lay it to rest at his family's burial plot in nearby Hanham.
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[email protected].
 
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ramonmercado said:
Here's an example of an English doctor using human skin to bind a book.
Killer relative still hanging around after 189 years
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ne ... rsity.html

A SHOCKED wife researching her family tree found she was related to a killer - still hanging from a NOOSE.

...
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Funeral for murderer hanged in 1821 after his skeleton is found in Bristol University cupboard
By Rob Cooper
Last updated at 9:32 AM on 13th April 2011

A murderer who was found hanging from a noose in a university cupboard 189 years after he was put to death will be given a proper burial for the first time today.
John Horwood was executed in 1821 after killing former girlfriend Eliza Balsom when he was aged just 18 - by throwing a pebble at her as she crossed a brook.
The attack in Bristol did not cause serious injury but she died after suffering an injection when a surgeon drilled a hole in her head to relieve pressure.

Horwood's body was used for dissection at Bristol Royal Informary - and his skeleton has been stored in a cupboard ever since, most recently at the city's university.

Mary Halliwell, 67, discovered she was a distant relative of Horwood, who was a miner from Hanham, Bristol, and won the legal right to his remains.
Today he will finally be given a funeral and buried exactly 190 years to the hour after he was hanged outside New Bristol Gaol.
While researching her family tree, Mrs Halliwell found out that the convicted murderer was the son of her great great great grandfather's brother.

Dr Richard Smith, who carried out surgery on Eliza after she had the pebble thrown at her, refused permission for John Horwood to be returned to his family.
After the dissection in front of 80 people Dr Smith kept the skeleton and put it on display - before it was later given to Bristol University.
And Horwood's skin was used to bind a book about the murder case. It is now on display at Bristol Records Office.

Funeral director Austin Williams told the BBC that young John will be buried next to his father after the service in Christ Church, Hanham.
After jilted Horwood split from Eliza vowed he would 'mash her bones to pieces' if he saw her with another man.
On January 26, 1821, he threw the pebble at her head - hitting her in the eye - as she walked with her new boyfriend William Waddy.
Following a day-long trial in Bedminster on April 11, John Horwood was sentenced to death. Two days later he was hanged.

Mrs Halliwell, who lives in Leigh, Manchester, with her husband David, said after winning the legal right to the remains that she wanted to belatedly give Horwood a 'dignified' send-off.
John Horwood was the 10th child of Thomas Horwood.
She told the Bristol Evening Post: 'I am angry that a human being, Dr Smith, could do something so barbaric to another person. It is terrible and certainly wasn't very dignified.
'As a descendant of his, my wish is to lay him to rest as his parents wanted – to have him buried in a dignified way.'

Hangings in the 19th century were a slow - and often agonising - process for the victims.
John turned to religion in the final days of his life and is quoted as saying: 'Lord, thou knowest that I did not mean then to take away her life but merely to punish her: though I confess that I had made up my mind, some time or other, to murder her.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1JOLWhEFt
 
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Dr Richard Smith, who carried out surgery on Eliza after she had the pebble thrown at her, refused permission for John Horwood to be returned to his family.
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So the same doctor that tried, and failed, to treat the victim gets to keep the murderer's body? That's a bit rum. The doctor probably had more to do with the death than the bloke who threw the stone, given the state of medical knowledge at the time.
 
This is really very interesting, with some nice photos.
Not sure where the video at the end fits in though.

Harvard discovers three of its library books are bound in human flesh

A few years ago, three separate books were discovered in Harvard University's library that had particularly strange-looking leather covers. Upon further inspection, it was discovered that the smooth binding was actually human flesh... in one case, skin harvested from a man who was flayed alive. Yep, definitely the creepiest library ever.

etc
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A Book by Its Cover

A quite brilliant article about the use of human skin, and its significance.

The strange history of books bound in human skin.

By Megan Rosenbloom
Wednesday, October 19, 2016

extract -
A Republican general named Beysser was said to have worn culottes fashioned from the vanquished Chouans while riding his horse in battle. King Louis XVI’s cousin Louis Philippe, who renamed himself Phillipe Égalité and joined the Jacobins in revolution, reportedly sported human-skin culottes impressively made of one piece of human skin with no sewing. In addition to human-hide fashion, talk proliferated about human-skin-bound books, now called anthropodermic bibliopegy.

At Le Bal du Zéphir, a legendary (and possibly fictitious) ball held inside a French cemetery, human-skin-bound leaflets of Droits de l’Homme were said to be given out as party favors. To this day books belonging to men like Armand-Jérôme Bignon, librarian to Louis XV, bear inscriptions such as “religatum de pelle humana” or “reliée en peau humaine,” though these are the only possible indicators of their bindings’ disturbing pedigree.

etc
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escargot1 said:
A quite brilliant article about the use of human skin
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Another very odd coincidence! Just over a week ago I was asked to prepare a lesson on a poem called Tissue, which is an extended meditation on paper and skin. The pupils were Asian and so was the poet, who refers to the Koran.

I felt it would be appropriate to take along with me an example of "India Paper" that thin tissue-like stuff used for pocket Bibles and other compact books from the late nineteenth century. I have a number of small volumes which would have served; the one I picked at random was Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution - all 960 pages of it in a half-inch width. It served its classroom purpose: "guess the number of pages!" Of course, I later had to browse through it. I was drawn to a chapter near the end entitled Flame Picture which ends with this, preserving Carlyle's odd punctuation:

"At Meudon," says Montgaillard with considerable calmness, "there was a Tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying: of which perfectly good wash-leather was made;" for breeches and other uses."

The article escargot posted this morning contains this sentence:
"Some in the crowd whispered that their culottes were made from the skins of recently executed Christians and other enemies of the Republic, at a special tannery for producing human leather in Meudon."

:eek::eek::eek:
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Another very odd coincidence! Just over a week ago I was asked to prepare a lesson on a poem called Tissue, which is an extended meditation on paper and skin. The pupils were Asian and so was the poet, who refers to the Koran.

I felt it would be appropriate to take along with me an example of "India Paper" that thin tissue-like stuff used for pocket Bibles and other compact books from the late nineteenth century. I have a number of small volumes which would have served; the one I picked at random was Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution - all 960 pages of it in a half-inch width. It served its classroom purpose: "guess the number of pages!" Of course, I later had to browse through it. I was drawn to a chapter near the end entitled Flame Picture which ends with this, preserving Carlyle's odd punctuation:

"At Meudon," says Montgaillard with considerable calmness, "there was a Tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying: of which perfectly good wash-leather was made;" for breeches and other uses."

The article escargot posted this morning contains this sentence:
"Some in the crowd whispered that their culottes were made from the skins of recently executed Christians and other enemies of the Republic, at a special tannery for producing human leather in Meudon."

:eek::eek::eek:
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:eek: indeed!

That bit jumped out at me too! The gist appears to be that as lots of people were being executed their skins were as available as animal pelts for tanning purposes. How grisly.

I asked for this thread to be renamed 'Books Bound in Human Skin' because it was hard to find when those interesting items cropped up and needed sharing.


Spotted this today -
Exclusive Real Human Leather Products

I'm hoping it's a spoof site. Daren't look too hard.
 
escargot1 said:
:eek: indeed!

That bit jumped out at me too! The gist appears to be that as lots of people were being executed their skins were as available as animal pelts for tanning purposes. How grisly.

I asked for this thread to be renamed 'Books Bound in Human Skin' because it was hard to find when those interesting items cropped up and needed sharing.


Spotted this today -
Exclusive Real Human Leather Products

I'm hoping it's a spoof site. Daren't look too hard.
Click to expand...
It's a real site/business (I believe) .. I researched it a few years back in connection with my Evil Dead fandom ...
 
Thank you for clearing that up.


I think.
 
escargot1 said:
Thank you for clearing that up.


I think.
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"The book is bound in human flesh and .... inked in human blood" was a line used in The Evil Dead film specifically about the prop book bearing the same name, sculpted by the F/X make up artist Tom Sullivan .. if you research the war crimes of Ilsa Koch (I think I've spelled it correctly), she had a fetish for collecting Jew's skin (she preferred tattoo'd skin apparently) ... anyway, she used the skin to bind a book amongst other things ..
 
Swifty said:
she had a fetish for collecting Jew's skin (she preferred tattoo'd skin apparently)
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Jewish people aren't allowed to be tattooed. Does it mean skin from tattooed Jewish people, or from any people with tattoos?

As many Jewish deportees were forced to have numbers tattooed on their wrists on arrival at concentration camps, it occurs to me that this must've been an added torture for them.
 
escargot1 said:
Jewish people aren't allowed to be tattooed. Does it mean skin from tattooed Jewish people, or from any people with tattoos?

As many Jewish deportees were forced to have numbers tattooed on their wrists on arrival at concentration camps, it occurs to me that this must've been an added torture for them.
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I'm not sure about the Jewish people not allowed to be tattooed stuff but 'The Bitch Of Buchenwald' concentration camp commandant's wife, Ilse Koch, had a thing for the skins of her prisoners and more .. these examples she had made were used against her in the Nuremburg trials ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Koch

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ilse koch gloves&rlz=1C1PRFG_enGB714GB714&biw=1093&bih=530&site=webhp&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj287qJ-YXQAhVHL8AKHWpRCyQQsAQIJw

 
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escargot said:
I came across that site a while ago and posted about it on'ere. Creepy.
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Sorry Little Mollusc, I should really read what's already been posted before posting something. But here is a screen grab of the web page:

humanleather1.jpg


The only thing that works on the menu is the "Contact Us" button.
 
For once there is something I really don't want to know any more about.

Who said 'civilisation is only skin deep'? :dcloud:
 
... and Aswad sang 'Beauty's Only Skin Deep' ... if we're having a skin deep round up (and John Ritter starred in the comedy film Skin Deep)

 
FelixAntonius said:
Sorry Little Mollusc, I should really read what's already been posted before posting something. But here is a screen grab of the web page:

humanleather1.jpg


The only thing that works on the menu is the "Contact Us" button.
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Great minds eh! Good work. WHAT a terrible thing to, well, even THINK about.
 
We are watching an episode the Great British Railway Journeys series, 'Longniddry to Edinburgh', which features a visit to the museum where a book bound in William Burke's skin is displayed. The cabinet also contains his death mask ans a violin.
 
escargot said:
We are watching an episode the Great British Railway Journeys series, 'Longniddry to Edinburgh', which features a visit to the museum where a book bound in William Burke's skin is displayed. The cabinet also contains his death mask ans a violin.
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Oh yes, we watched that too. And have seen the real thing obviously!
 
MrRING said:
... Just found a book called Georgia Curiosities by William Schemmel.
In it, it says that the University of Georgia has a book published in 1599 called Apollodurus bound in human skin, or so it has written in it.
The article goes on to say that it wasn't neccisarily a ghoulish practiice, that people would will their skin to be made into books to be "immortalized", so it was probably done by somebody who wanted it done. ...
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Here's an image of page 6 in Georgia Curiosities - the account MrRING cited ...

GACuriosities-BoundInSkin-p6.jpg

​
SOURCE: https://books.google.com/books/abou...ource=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q=skin&f=false
 
Mighty_Emperor said:
... The Boston Athenaeum, a private library, has an 1837 copy of George Walton's memoirs bound in his own skin. Walton was a highwayman -- a robber who specialized in ambushing travelers -- and he left the volume to one of his victims, John Fenno. Fenno's daughter gave it to the library. ...
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This book is not usually on public display, but it's occasionally exhibited.

The full details on this skin-bound book:

Creator(s)
Allen, James, 1809-1837.
Title
Narrative of the life of James Allen : alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the highwayman : being his death-bed confession, to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison.
Variant title(s)
Hic liber Waltonis cute compactus est
Date
1837
Publishing details
Boston : Harrington & Co. ...
Local Notes
... Bound by Peter Low in Allen's skin, treated to look like gray deer skin; bears the cover title "Hic liber Waltonis cute compactus est" stamped in gold upon a black leather rectangle .

SOURCE: http://cdm.bostonathenaeum.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15482coll3/id/4273
(Includes photo of the book's cover)
 
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