Harvard University has apologised and removed the human skin binding from a book in its collection.
The 19th-century French treatise on the human soul has been housed at Houghton Library, Harvard’s home for rare books and manuscripts, since the 1930s.
The writer Arsène Houssaye is said to have given the copy Des destinées de l’âme (Destinies of the Soul) to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, in the mid-1880s.
Bouland is then reported to have bound the book in skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient from a French psychiatric hospital who had died of natural causes. A handwritten note by Bouland inserted into the volume states: “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.”
The book has been at Harvard since 1934, first on deposit from the American diplomat and Harvard alumnus John Stetson and later formally donated in 1954 by Stetson’s widow, Ruby.
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The practice, known as anthropodermic bibliopegy, is rare and controversial, and the university was criticised for displaying the book.
Harvard announced on Wednesday it had removed the binding and was looking at options for “a final respectful disposition of these human remains”.
“We apologise on behalf of Harvard Library for past failures in our stewardship of the book that further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being at the centre,” said Tom Hyry, the associate university librarian for archives and special collections.
The university placed a moratorium on new research access to the book in February last year and has removed all images of the skin from its catalogue, online blog posts, and other channels.
The disbound book will remain in Houghton Library’s collection and will again be available to researchers — without its cover.
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The removal of the skin binding follows a campaign led by the American academic librarian Paul Needham for the woman’s remains to be interred in France.
In an open letter to Alan M Garber, Harvard’s interim president, Needham and others accused the library of handling the book “brutishly on a regular basis, as an attention-grabbing, sensationalised display item”.
The letter highlighted a now-removed 2014 blog post which called research on the book “good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike”.
Harvard identified more than 20,000 human remains in its collections in a report released in 2022. These morbid objects range from locks of hair and bone fragments to full skeletons. The remains can be attributed to roughly 6,500 Native Americans as well as 19 people of African descent who may have been slaves.
