3. Books
Des Destinees de l’Ame in French or Destinies of the Soul in English is the name of a book on the shelves of Harvard University’s library. Most people will mistake the brown, dusty, and aged cover for a typical book—until they realize it’s actually brown, dusty, and aged human skin. Anthropodermic bibliopegy, or the process of binding books with human skin, was popular in ancient times.
The book was written by author Arsene Houssaye. After she had done it, she sent it to a doctor named Ludovic Bouland in the 1880s. Dr. Bouland was the one who added the human skin cover. He’d obtained the skin from a woman who had died in a mental institution.
