General Discussion

Interview with Megan Rosenbloom, Author of "Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin"

https://www.patreon.com/posts/interview-with-36030378



We are delighted to share a fascinating new interview today! In it, our founder Joanna Ebenstein chats with medical librarian and co-founder/director of Death Salon Megan Rosenbloom about sadomasochism, The French Revolution, Gutenberg Bibles, The Danse Macabre, and "anthropodermic bibliopegy" as explored in her new book Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.



You can find out more about about Megan and her work here, and her bio follows the interview. You can find out more about her multidisciplinary scientific team that tests anthropodermic books here. You can pre-order her book, slated to be released this October, from IndieBound, Amazon, or wherever books are sold. Hope you enjoy! Feel free to ask Megan any questions in the comments section! Ans special thanks to Cristina Marcelo for the excellent transcription from a less than ideal quality audio interview.



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INTERVIEW

Joanna: Megan, can you tell me your name and what you do?

Megan: My name is Megan Rosenbloom. I am a medical librarian (so busy times for us) at the University of Southern California. I’m also a writer, and I wrote a book called Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.

J: Awesome. So what is the—I love the scientific term for this—what is the scientific term again for book bound in human skin?

M: People like to lay this phrase on it because it sounds really fancy: anthropodermic bibliopegy, which is anthro being human, dermic being skin, biblio as book, and pegy being fastened. Human skin book fastening.

J: And where does that phrase trace to? I get the sense this is just, from what you said, maybe something that book connoisseurs made up because it sounds good, is that right?

M: Yeah, you know, I don’t know because it’s not something that people used when they were doing it. In the 19th century when doctors were using patients’ skin they didn’t call it that. I actually have not been able to decipher when that started being used as a phrase.

J: Books bound in a human skin was a phenomenon that was mainly in the 19th century, is that right?

M: Well, the rumors about it started around the French Revolution, which also happens to coincide with the beginning of clinical medicine. But any book thus far that my team has been able to test that’s from the French Revolutionary era has proven to be not real human skin, so we have yet to test one that actually proves to be real from that era. Most of them are coming from the mid to late 19th century, and pretty much any real human skin book’s story that I’ve been able to trace the provenance for almost always has a doctor involved in the creation of a book. There’s usually a doctor who takes the skin of a patient, maybe from their autopsy table or the anatomy lab, and just saves the skin for later. Often these doctors were book collectors and they would save the skin and use it to bind their favorite books, but then in some of the other cases, if some other kind of collector wanted to make this kind of book, they usually employed a doctor to be the one to remove the skin before it was tanned and made ready to be a book binding.

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