It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
I don’t want to write this article. But I think I have to say something. You may remember the movie The Silence of the Lambs. In it, a serial killer by the name of “Buffalo Bill” is skinning women, trying to make his own suit of skin. The best thing about the movie is that the actor who played Buffalo Bill went on to play Captain Leland Stottlemeyer on Monk. Otherwise, I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t think fiction about serial killers is ever very good. It is always filled with the most unbelievable police work. Real serial killers are much more interesting. But I’m getting side tracked. So this serial killer was sewing himself a skin suit, which is at least totally creepy.
That brings us to yesterday, when Alexis Madrigal informed me that, Science Confirms: Yup, This Book Really Is Bound in Human Skin. Not that I am implying anything about Madrigal, but this is not the first time he’s written on the subject; two months ago, he wrote, It Was Once “Somewhat Common” to Bind Books With Human Skin. He started the article like this:
Let’s suppose you were a rich man in the middle of the 17th century and you really loved Shakespeare’s sonnets. (You shouldn’t; they’re weak.) And you die. What a great use of your estate to have a copy of the sonnets bound with your skin. It could be propped up on a table in the sitting room and your children could say, “Dad’s looking good today!” According to Heather Cole, a curator at Harvard’s Houghton Library, “The confessions of criminals were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted.” I’m thinking something like this:
Anyway, after testing for just about every form of ape and monkey skin around, Harvard now knows it has an actual book bound in human skin. And what is this book? It is Des Destinees de l’Ame by the French novelist Arsene Houssaye. You would think that any article about this book would mention what it is about. It is, after all, bound with human skin! But no. Even though he wrote well over a hundred works, English Wikipedia isn’t much interested in him. French Wikipedia is more interested, providing a more detailed biography and an actual list of works. But there is no entry on this book, but we do know he wrote it when he was 65 years old and the title in English is, The Destiny of the Soul.
According to an article in The Guardian, it is Houssaye’s “mediations on the spirit.” I assume that it was not published bound with human skin. In fact, an inscription on the last page of this copy reads:
That’s 247 years before Des Destinees de l’Ame was published. So someone must have taken the original book, disposed of the pages, and put Houssaye’s book inside it. And why not? I mean, it is a book about the nature of the spirit, it ought to be encased inside human skin. But it’s still creepy as hell.
It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.