Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin with the author Megan Rosenbloom

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“Anthropodermic books demand that we wrestle with mortality and what happens when immortality is thrust upon us, and they have clarified my own moral vision as a librarian and caretaker of what remains of the past. All of these realizations came to me over time. I started off with simply a healthy dose of morbid curiosity.”

Welcome to the Morbidly Curious Book Club’s Podcast! In this episode, we are discussing our January 2024 book pick, “DARK ARCHIVES: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.”

About: On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historical and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy--the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world's most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship.

Megan Rosenbloom was the co-founder and director of Death Salon, the event arm of The Order of the Good Death, and a proponent of the Death Positive movement. She leads a research team called The Anthropodermic Book Project that aims to find the historical and scientific truths behind the world’s alleged books bound in human skin, or anthropodermic bibliopegy, and her bestselling debut book about this practice, titled Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, was a New York Times Editors Choice and won the 2021 LAMPHHS Best Monograph Award. In a former life, she was a journalist in Philadelphia and continues to write for both academic and non-academic publications.

Megan’s publications mentioned: [https://meganrosenbloom.com/publications/

Harvard article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-27721571

Purchase Dark Archives here, if unavailable see if there’s a used copy on PangoBooks!: https://bookshop.org/p/books/dark-archives-a-librarian-s-investigation-into-the-science-and-history-of-books-bound-in-human-skin-megan-rosenbloom/14220868?ean=9781250800169

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