Human skin binding on book

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Harvard University has removed the binding of human skin from a 19th Century book kept in its library.

Des Destinées de l'Ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s.

In 2014, scientists determined that the material it was bound with was in fact human skin.

But the university has now announced it has removed the binding "due to the ethically fraught nature of the book's origins and subsequent history".

Des Destinées de l'Ame is a meditation on the soul and life after death, written by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s.

He is said to have given it to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor, who then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes.

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Did you know such a book existed?

I wonder if Himmler had heard about it and that's what gave him the idea.

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If you have a lamp made in Germany during the years of World War Two, the shade may give you bad dreams. If you have a leather wallet or leather bound book from that era, you may want to bury it. The same is true of jewelry and some clothing, you may think twice about having them in your home.

In Germany during World War Two, leather and certain other raw material was scarce. The SS, under Heinrich Himmler found new uses for some of the 'goods' produced at some of their facilities.

http://themediadesk.com/newfiles2/holocaust.htm

In pop horror mythology the Book of the Dead Necronomicon is often said to be made with human skin.