Harvard owns century-old book bound in human skin

Harvard University is home to a book which has its binding done in real human skin.

The donor of the 1880's book titled Des destinees de l'ame (Destinies of The Soul), which had belonged to Harvard's Houghton Library since the 1930's, explained in a note that was kept inside the book, saying that it was indeed bound in human skin parchment on which "no ornament had been stamped to preserve its elegance", the Verge reported.

Harvard investigated the binding's origin, and Bill Lane, director of the university's Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, said that the results were 99.9 percent in favor, making the binding very unlikely to be in something other than human skin.

It is believed that the of the owner book, which is now the only one known to be bound in human skin throughout all the Harvard libraries, got the skin from the back of a dead female mental patient, whose body was unclaimed.