Week 9: My idea of fun

Like many of my fellow classmates and bloggers, I mentioned in my introductory post that one of the reasons I took this class was simply because I knew I would enjoy it. In my final semester at the iSchool (and in school in general) it was important to me to learn about something and simply enjoy the process and discussion. I’m taking a similar approach to the final paper and trying worry less about its potential for publications or conference presentations and instead just considering a topic I know I will enjoy researching and writing about. And so, we come to my somewhat morbid fascination with anthropodermic bibliopegy, or books bounds in human skin.

I first stumbled upon this subject two years ago, when the Book History and Print Culture program posted this article on their Facebook page, about Harvard discovering three of their library books were ostensibly bound in human skin. To be clear, upon further testing it turned out they could only confirm that “at least one” book was legitimate. Since I first read that article, the practice has fascinated me and has been in the back of my mind. I tried to learn more wherever I could, but it wasn’t until late last year that I finally found an academic, scientific, contemporary source of information: the newly formed Anthropodermic Book Project. Even if, like many of the people I’ve spoken with, you find this practice “creepy” and “gross,” I encourage you to check out the site as I won't go into the full details of the project in this post.

What interests me about anthropodermic books in the context of this class is how, even more than regular tree books, their physicality is such an important part of how people interact with them. While simply imaging a book bound in human skin can be enough to make your own skin crawl, imagine the bodily sensation and subsequent emotional reaction of actually holding and touching one. In the simplest terms I will touch upon Hayles’s question, from the recommended reading "Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality," of how to even consider coding for the sensory experience of a book (p. 269). Overall I plan to take a more theoretical approach to the topic, exploring how and why anthropodermic books were made and the choices behind them. While accounts of these books are often preoccupied with their bindings, their content can be equally as fascinating as the choice to bind a book in human skin often had meaning, like creating a memorial object post mortem or a visible punishment for a crime, and I am interested in that connection. Other ideas I’m throwing around include considering Benjamin’s concept of Aura in connection to these objects, or more modern scholarship on ebooks and the body.  I’m still working out the finer details and the larger connections to themes from the class, but before you ask, with some trepidation, yes, Professor Galey luckily ok'd this rather macabre topic. 

Hayles, N. Katharine. "Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality." Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2003): 263-90.