Police plea on macabre book find
Police are trying to locate the owner of a 300-year-old ledger, bound in human skin, found in a Leeds road.
Written mainly in French, its macabre covering was said to be a regular sight during the French Revolution. In the 18th and 19th Centuries it was common to bind accounts of murder trials in the killer's skin - known as anthropodermic bibliopegy.
The book was discovered in The Headrow and may have been discarded after a burglary, detectives said.
-- from the BBC
I knew there was some dark undercurrent to the annual International Medieval Congress in Leeds. Now we catch a glimpse of just how necromatic it might actually be.
4 comments:
OK. I like creepy stuff just as much as the next person, but human-skin leather binding is just a little over the top.
My revised and updated copy of the delightful, and puerile, and sometimes just bad Bizarre Books lists a copy of Paradise Lost bound in the skin of a murderer, George Cudmore. Bound in 1830, Albert Memorial Library, Exeter has it.
It also lists a copy of Mein Kampf bound in skunk skin.
Heocwaeth, I'm with you -- but there is something sickly fascinating about the subject. And I really like the word anthropodermic.
Karl: leave it to you to have further references on the topic that make it even weirder. And the Mein Kampf bound in skunk hide: priceless, just priceless.
Nifty. Makes those "texts as bodies" arguments some scholars have been writing for the past couple of decades or so seem all that more compelling . . . .
Post a Comment