NYTimes article that is creepy and interesting:
Of the roughly 20 million books in Harvard University’s libraries, one has long exerted a unique dark fascination, not for its contents, but for the material it was reputedly bound in: human skin.
For years, the volume — a 19th-century French treatise on the human soul — was brought out for show and tell, and sometimes, according to library lore, used to haze new employees. In 2014, the university drew jokey news coverage around the world with the announcement that it had used new technology to confirm that the binding was in fact human skin….
Yes, they are not as uncommon as one might hope. We had one at SMU, which we returned to a Native American community for burial back in the 90s, while Harvard was still shilly shallying about theirs. –v
We do not have such a book, although that has never stopped students coming in to ask to see one. They all claim to have “heard” that we own one. How do these rumours get started?