Ologies with Alie Ward - Anthropodermic Biocodicology (HUMAN LEATHER BOOKS) with Megan Rosenbloom & Daniel Kirby

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Anthropodermic bibliopegy is a long, fancy way of saying “HUMAN SKIN BOOKS” and the study of confirming or debunking them is … Anthropodermic Biocodicology. For this skin-crawling, history-trawling Spooktober episode, we chat with the absolutely wonderful and charming medical librarian and expert of books bound in human skin, Megan Rosenbloom. Also on the line: analytical chemist Dr. Daniel Kirby, who discusses how books are tested to confirm if they are, in fact, human leather. Why would someone make these? What’s in between the covers? Whose skin is it? What do they smell like? And what can they tell us about our culture and our past?Rosenbloom has just released her book “Dark Archives” and gives us a peek into the world she’s come to know so well. Listen under a blanket or with a nightlight on, though. It’ll give you goosebumps. Follow Megan Rosenbloom at Instagram.com/libraryatnight and Twitter.com/libraryatnight Buy Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin anywhere books are sold! Megan Rosenbloom’s website: https://meganrosenbloom.com/ A donation went to: BlackMamasMatter.org More links at alieward.com/ologies/anthropodermicbiocodicology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's that pumpkin that you carved too early. And now it looks extra terrifying. Ali Ward, back with another spooky, literally kind of scary episode of ologies. It's about... Are you ready for this? Books. Oh! Shiver me timbers.

Just creeping my papers. Tombs of horror. Well, not usually, but sometimes. So before we tiptoe through the stacks, let's say some thanks to everyone at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show. Thank you to everyone who is passing along these spooktube episodes to friends and people who you call canvassing. Thanks to everyone who is subscribed and who rates and, of course, reviews the show, which

earnestly I read every review and they make my dark nights glowier, such as this one left this week by peglegsali saying, hey there, it's me, the listener who kept procrastinating on reviewing this amazing podcast. If you need to expand your world, and let's be honest, after the last six months of social distancing, we all do, then this podcast has an episode or several for you to dive into. Thanks ologies for helping me get through this. Thanks for leaving the reviews, y'all. Okay, so anthropodermic biocodicology.

How sexy is that? Do you want to make that your Netflix password or like a secret utterance that buys you admission into a basement speak easy anthropodermic biocodicology? So what does it mean? I'm going to let the ologists explain it. And that's right. There are two ologists on the horn, a two for kiddos. One anthropodermic biocodicologist got his bachelor's in analytical chemistry and a master's

in bioanalytical chemistry and then a PhD in analytical mass spectrometry. He explains what that is. Now the other ologist is an author, a medical librarian, currently the collections strategies librarian at the UCLA library and a co-founding director of the desk salon events. And I have known her for over a decade through those events. I have always adored her. She has a degree in journalism and a master's in library and information science. And she is just exceptional at digging up correct information and presenting it in a

really charming, affable way. And I have wanted to interview her about this for years. She's not only a friend, she's also an ologist listener. She's weighed in on chats in the Facebook ologies group about this topic as she was writing this book. And her brand new book is called Dark Archives, a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin, which is released October 20th. The date this episode comes out, also known as tomorrow, since I'm recording this on

the 19th from my parents' house in the beautiful Creepy Woods, a perfect spooktober episode. One guest is a bookworm, the other is a scientist who literally studies bookworms. But how creepy are these skin books? What do they look like? Are they hairy? How many of them are there? Who owns them? Are they cursed?

What's the deal? And should you judge a book by its cover if you find out that it's made of people? Well, brew a steamy beverage, drag a chair up to the fireside and lean in to hear about forbidden binding, spines made of skin, medical oddities, museum treasures, rumors, flimflam, highway robbers, jars of tattoos, and of course, Dark Archives with anthropodermic biocodicologists Dr. Daniel Kirby and Megan Rosenblum. So we got all kinds of questions from silly ones to how do you analyze and how do you care for these items?

Well, let's have the silly ones first. Okay. We'll do. There's no shortage, trust me. The first thing I'll have both of you do is if you can say your first and last name and make sure I pronounce it right and also the pronouns. So she, her, he, them, they, whatever you go by, Megan Rosenblum, she, her, Daniel Kirby, he, him.

So I'm going to need a little bit of help pronouncing this ology. Anthropodermic Bibliopedic Codegology? No. I, I have a confession to make a secret, which is for an embarrassingly long time I said this wrong. Okay. So I, the thing I was doing, the thing I was writing a book about, I was walking around saying Anthropodermic Bibliopeggy, it is anthropodermic.

So anthropo human, or anthropo human, dermic skin, Bibliobook and Peggy or whatever is Fassin. So to Fassin or bind a book in human skin is anthropodermic Bibliopogy, which my friend Dr. Lindsay FitzHarris, she's a historian of medicine. She did a video about this and she called it Anthropodermic Bibliopogy. She's American, but she lives in London and I thought, oh, she's just being fancy in British by saying it that way. Looked it up and found out I was saying it wrong the whole time.

Oh no. And then Biocodacology? Yeah, Biocodacology. What, what does that mean? And Daniel, is that kind of your wheelhouse from a analytical lab-based scientific perspective? Well, probably closer than Megan. We're, we're nowhere, I'm serious, we're kind of at a crossroads because what this is all about is, is using science and I'm the science end of things and the librarian

and their collections and marrying the two together and getting new information. And so the codacology really means studying books or the study of books. We're now digging in a little bit deeper and scraping things off the surface and analyzing to see what they are and analyzing the materials themselves. So it's, it's kind of a frontier thing. Traditionally, the idea of codacology, you know, has existed for a while and that is the studying of the physical aspects of the book, all right, how it was bound, what paper, it's made out of, what you can tell from looking at the physical object, not so much

the text that it contains, you know. So you might learn things about what kind of, how books were made because of the manuscript scraps that were used in the, underneath the binding and things like that. And that, that's more traditional codacology. You can tell from different kinds of handwriting where a manuscript was created, for instance, what time period. There are all these interesting hands, they call them, like, you know, 18th century secretary hands or you can tell that that was a French, you know, 18th century person.

But the biocodacology is like using, you know, the physical aspects of the book, but studying them with various, through various like biological methods. I feel like they'll look back and see bubble lettering and they'll be like, early 90s, 6th grade, female, nailed it. They're like Stussy S, male, 7th grade. It's our burn book. Megan, side note, says that some historians predict that our textbooks and highlighted underlined books will be the treasures of tomorrow to see handwriting and notes that

give clues about what was important in our current culture. So doodle away if you have no plans to sell the book or if it's not a library book, of course. Librarians like Megan would not like that. Now, how did you both come to make a career out of this? Megan, you have obviously have known you for like a decade and you were always the book lady, the death positive book lady. But how did you end up studying anthropodermic bibliocodaclad?

How did that end up becoming your field? It's kind of funny when you end up at a place and then you go back and you think, oh, of course you would end up being the human skin book lady given all of this. But that was not my intent or expectation for my career. I guess the human skin book life found me in a certain way, but I started off as a journalist. I used to work at an NPR station in Philadelphia and I did a story on librarians in the Patriot Act and interviewing librarians, I was kind of like, oh, I think these are my people. This feels good.

And then when I decided, well, maybe I wanted a career that was perhaps a little more stable than journalism, oddly prescient, I was like, oh, well, I could go back to school for library science. You need a master's in library science to be a librarian generally. So while I was in school, I got really interested in rare books and special collections, but at the time it was like right at the beginning of when people started doing online library school. So they didn't really have a way to study that stuff.

So I just kind of found my ways of doing that by volunteering at various places. I know you've done similar things, volunteering at places because you loved it and then, whoops, you end up. Yeah. Yeah. So I know that you get that for sure. I was a docent at the Rosenbach Museum, which is such a cool like book history museum in Philadelphia.

And right down the street is my other favorite museum in Philadelphia, which is the Mooder Museum. And that was a 19th century sort of teaching collection of rare medical presentations of various kinds. And it was there at the Mooder Museum that among a colon the size of a small car and they conjoined livers of Chang and Ang Bunker, that there is these books in a case with their covers closed. And I was like, why would you put books in a case with covers closed?

And then I read the descriptions and it said that they were all bound in human skin. And I'm just looking around like, does anyone know this? Should we call somebody? This is not okay. You know, I was so surprised that, you know, even though I was in a room full of hundreds of corpses, the book was the thing that kind of blew my mind and freaked me out, but fascinated me at the same time. Fast forward many years later and I'm a librarian and all that.

I was working on another idea for a book and I was traveling around going to different libraries and doing some research. And every time I would go, I would ask whether they had any human skin books because I was just, you know, it was just one of the things I was asking among other things and a surprising amount of places were like, oh yeah, I think we have one or two of those or I think we used to have one, but we don't anymore. People seem to not fully know whether they had them or not sometimes or on the campus tour guide say we do, but we don't and so annoying.

And during one of those trips, but I went to Harvard because that was the first place that really did a test in 2014, I believe it was that tested their three alleged human skin books for the first time to find out whether they were really human. And two of them turned out to be not human. And then one of them turned out to be real. And it was this sort of, whoa, moment in library land where people were like, wait, okay, these things aren't just rumors that people talked about. There's actually a real one.

And it was a big controversy. Okay. And on the other side, when this news broke in 2014, international headlines breathlessly blared things like Harvard confirms antique book is bound in human skin. Now historically speaking, this confirmation was a big deal and it still is. And the person who did those tests was someone by the name of Daniel Kirby, who is on this call who's a guest on all these right now. So Megan was like, oh, hey, let's chat my dude.

And so while I was there, I arranged to meet with Daniel and talk to him about how he performed those tests. And then we started comparing notes and, you know, oh, I heard there's one here or I heard there's one there and, you know, the rest is history. And Daniel, how did you end up being the guy swabbing the human skin book? How did your resume lead you there? That's a very good question. I couldn't, I can answer it in a long form, but it's all happenstance, completely happenstance.

Daniel had worked with IBM and semiconductors for a long time and then headed to Boston and worked at Northeastern University. And then at the Harvard Proteomics Center, which is proteomics is really the analysis and study of proteins and worked for a couple other drug companies. In 2003, I took a year off and did a long bike trip with a group going around the world. And when you're on a long bike trip going around the world, you have plenty of time to think about what you'd really like to be doing. And my, the conclusion I came to is that I, you know, I enjoy chemistry and I enjoy analytical

chemistry very much. What I didn't enjoy with some of the drug companies, et cetera, was being so isolated that you do your work and you throw an answer over the wall and you never have any idea where it's going. So I started thinking about other things and about that time, the Harvard Art Museums was advertising for a position for a post-graduate person, which I was, although very post-post. And this was one of the so-called Mellon Fellowships where they would bring in a PhD to work in conservation.

People said he applied, but didn't get it, but ended up working with them as a volunteer on some archival projects. We started looking into the idea of doing protein or protein analysis, and this was about the same time that the archaeologists were using mass spectrometry and protein analysis to identify bones and other artifacts from archaeological contexts. And I began to do this, and especially looking at samples like parchment. Can I tell the difference between parchment? Well, this got to be known around the conservation group in the immediate area, especially in

the Weissman Preservation Center, which is the preservation center that services the libraries at Harvard. And my friend there, Alan Puglia, happened to be working on, I don't know whether it was a survey or an actual treatment, on one of the Harvard books that was supposedly bound in human skin. And this was the beginning of this lovely journey. So he called me, and he knew that I was working in identifying proteins or analyzing proteins to understand the origin of the material, which animal it was.

And he said, why don't you come over and take a look at this book, which I did. And it turned out to be the Spanish law text from the law library, which turned out not to be human skin. And so this story got around in the papers, and out of the woodwork came the other two libraries at Harvard who had other books that were purported to be bound in human skin and analyzed the first one, and it was not. And finally, the one from, I believe it was the Houghton Library turned out to be human skin.

And this actually set off quite a bunch of fireworks that even made the Irish Times, which is kind of what I use as a high watermark. So he came out of retirement and ended up being the guy in proteomics, which is protein analysis. So when it comes to having your alleged human leather book gently, respectfully swabbed, he's the go-to. Is it swabbed? It's just a niche I've gotten into.

I've never regretted it, and I hope I can keep doing it for a long time to come. How is that sample collected, and how is it analyzed, and how do you determine if it's a different type of mammal or another type of animal skin? That's a very good question, as I can take you through that. The sample collection, it's always a big issue with conservators. They don't like to see you running after them with a scalpel to take a chunk of something. No. Or in other cases, we use a very fine abrasive to take an infinitesimal amount of sample.

If there's a place on a book, for example, that there's previous damage, you can usually go in and just pick out a teeny fiber. The analysis that we do is extremely sensitive. What I generally tell people who want to submit a sample, if you can physically see the sample under about 30x magnification, that's still more than enough to use. So it's usually a pretty straightforward to get a sample of a book binding, and the way the analysis is done, you have to realize that a book binding is made from collagen, which is the material that makes up about 30% of the protein in our bodies.

It's what the skin, your hide, the bones are actually a large percentage of collagen. So for more on bones, see the osteology episode from last year's Spooktober to learn that you are just an alive erector set, you're just a breathing meat scaffold, gorgeous. Any of your connective tissues, your gut tissues, things like that, ivory is actually a large percentage of collagen. Collagen is a very durable material, and durable in the sense that in archeological contexts where a leather object or a bone has been buried for a long period of time, we can still generally obtain enough collagen from it to be able to do the analysis.

The way the analysis is done, collagen is a protein. Proteins are made up of strings of amino acids. Each protein has just a different sequence or different types of amino acids in a row. And so the way we identify a protein is to cut the protein into smaller pieces and then use mass spectrometry to weigh the different individual pieces that we've obtained. And some from the weights of these different peptides are called, we can relate that to a reference material, which produces the same assortment of masses or peptide weights. And this is called peptide mass fingerprinting.

So it's really just a matter of cutting up the protein, doing the mass spectrometric analysis, and you get a spectrum, a bunch, it looks like a field of grass with, and each tip of the grass has a mass associated with it. And we just look for masses that correspond to reference samples that we know. So mass spectrometry is hard to say, and it accelerates and then throws a curveball at and deflects particles, measuring the deflection path to figure out what we're working with. And Megan says when she hears news from Daniel's lab results, it's a bit thrilling because it's raw knowledge.

It's something that has not been known before definitively. But people have extremely different reactions to the news, right? Some people are very excited because of the discovery aspect or just a general morbid curiosity. Some people are really disappointed to find out when they're real because then they have to deal with the fact that they have a real human skin book and how do we address having this thing in our collections? Or some places that have found out that their books are fake, then print out the little

things to hand out to campus tour guides to tell them to stop telling people there's a human skin book there. There's a real sort of wide variety to how people react. And so it's always very exciting to me whenever we get results, regardless of whether they're real or fake. And if they end up being fake, then the big question is always, well, why would you fake that? Who at what point wrote Bound in Human Skin on that book?

And why did they do that if it wasn't actually true? How many now have been confirmed? So we've, in public collections, so libraries, museums, we've confirmed 18 books as human skin. 13 have been proven to be not human skin. We've also, as a team, done a few side journeys, I guess, of testing either objects that aren't actually books. And some private collectors have now gotten wind that we're doing this and have gotten

interested in getting their books tested as well. Megan is part of the Anthropodermic Book Project. And when she reads the emails submitted to the site, well, she finds some real doozies. If it wasn't detrimental to the privacy of the people who email, I wish I could just do a dramatic reading of some of the emails that I get, but I get emails pretty much once every week or two weeks of someone saying that they think that they have, or they heard that there's one at this place, or I think my grandfather has one in his attic and inquiring about testing without actually going through with it necessarily.

And I have to ask, that first Harvard book that was confirmed, what was between the covers? What kind of book is that? It's a French book. The French. It's by a writer named Arsène Hussay. It's called, please forgive my French, Des destinés de l'âme, which is like destinies of the soul. And that's the sort of meditation on the soul and how the soul does it persist after death

and all of it, like this kind of really philosophical thing that was written by someone who was mourning the loss of the wife and his friend was a doctor because there's always a doctor. I'll repeat this, there's always a doctor. Also I looked up that first confirmed book from the Harvard archives made from the back of an unwitting patient and it looks like soft leather, kind of yellowish undertones, maybe some brownish modeling from time and where, but you zoom in closer and you see the delicate texture of goosebumps, kind of looks like my winter legs, I'll be honest. Sort of one of the main threads in my book is like, how do you get to the point where

you're a doctor who says, this is proper, this is a proper okay thing to do. There's nothing weird or creepy or gross about doing that. And so that has a lot to do with the investigation in my book and what these objects tell us about the history of clinical medicine. In general, are you finding something thematic in all of the ones that end up being bound in human skin? Is there something thematic about existence or mortality or religion or occult or are these like cookbooks for lentil stews and like Sweet Valley High?

There's got to be something that they have in common. There are, I guess, general schools, I would say. There is the anatomy or old medical book rebound in human skin, like maybe the nicest medical book that you had as a doctor or book collector. There's the vaguely philosophical. There's some that we haven't actually tested, but you know, are on the list of potential books that are like Milton's Paradise Lost and that kind of thing. Okay.

Yeah, I looked it up. I wasn't sure. I was like, what's Paradise Lost? It's a 10,000 line biblical poem written by John Milton, who also some trivia at the time he was working on this was in his 60s. So if you have excuses for not writing a book, just open a Google Doc, start noodling around. Now other topics bound in people, Megan says literature, poetry books, and a certain dark genre of Anglo-Anthropodermic, bibliopagy, bibliopagy, oh my God, bibliopagy.

And then there is the school of English books mostly that are the allegedly because we haven't tested them yet. Books that were are the trial transcripts of horrible murderers that are bound in the skin of the murderer. No after execution. Yeah. That is part of this. Originally it was very easy to get the death penalty in England in the 19th century.

You could get the death penalty for things like stealing and stuff like that. So if you were a murderer, then they wanted to make it extra horrible punishment for the crime and also because it was really hard to get a hold of bodies for dissection. So the murders were one of the few kind of easy to get bodies for this rapid increase in need for anatomical learning specimens. So they would publicly dissect bodies, they would take pieces of skin, they would take different souvenirs. There was a lot of sort of weird trophy gathering stuff.

They would then take the skeleton and those are the skeletons that would sometimes end up in the anatomy schools or in the hospital or whatever as articulate skeletons. So they really just kind of used a lot of the parts there. And some of them ended up as books allegedly. On the topic of anatomy classes, if you ever want to see actual photos of young 19th century doctors lying like a corpse on a table surrounded by their cadavers posed in lab coats above them, just feel free to Google a student's dream, but not if you're prone to nightmares. I have a very stupid anatomy of a book question actually, it's a human anatomy.

When you're talking about the binding of the book, is that the leather bound cover or a spine or where is the skin actually used? It depends on the individual book. So some of them are just the spine covered in skin. And some of them are the entire whole book that are covered in skin. In terms of the books that we've found, some of them are very sophisticated, obviously very professional bindings and some are a little career, a lot of the ones that end up being fake.

People think that is a creepy looking gross book that has like hair growing out of it. Like literally you could see like big follicles and it's stained and it looks like something you would find in, you know, a serial killer's lab or something, those end up almost always being sheep. Oh, sheep, big pores. Sheep are like, yikes, gotta get some poor minimizer. Who knew? You think they would be pig because pigs or pig skin is similar to human.

There have been a few that were pig, but mostly sheep. I have to ask, what does it feel like? Like what is the texture? And can you even touch it or is it this is like a gloves only situation? It's the number one question I get as a librarian is always, shouldn't you be wearing gloves? Don't judge me. But librarians or people who are working with, you know, rare books, in general, you do not wear gloves because you're more likely to rip a page or damage a book if you cannot

use your, you know, skin to be able to tell, you know, what you're doing to it. So you're supposed to wash and dry your hands frequently when you're using handling rare books. So I've touched over a dozen, I would say, alleged one way or another human skin books with my bare hands. Almost every institution lets you actually hold the book. But when you hold them, they must all look like a book shaped naked person, right? Maybe one of the creepiest things about them is that they look like pretty much any other

book. They can come in any sort of color, any kind of, you know, level of decoration or not. You wouldn't really know you were holding one unless someone told you. And there's actually, there are stories in the book where I was holding something and then they told me that it was, oh, that's our human skin book and I'm like, oh, you know, it's kind of like, well, heads up, please. I will say personally, you know, everyone has their line of squickiness, right? What is the grossest thing?

For me, it's the ones that are human suede. It's appropriately, disgustingly called an ooze binding, O-O-Z-E ooze. So it's like- I do what I want to know. It's the, so suede, just like in an animal, it's either the underside or a split skin. It's like the inside part that is rough and kind of soft and rawhide-ish or something instead of being that smooth sort of leather follicle side where the hair comes out, it's, those are gross.

I will fully cop to that. I did not know that humans could be suede. And we're going to get to listener questions. The biggest listener question I got, of course, was all caps, why, why, why, why? But before we get to that, I do want to ask, is there anything emotional that happens when you're handling this or when you are looking at your peptide spectroscopy and you realize that this is the product of a human life? Is there a moment where you stop to acknowledge it?

What happens emotionally to you? Is it pretty scientific or does it feel like a gut punch? If you're asking me, it's really pretty much scientific. Maybe that's a personal fault. No. I don't know. No, I look at these as pretty objectively. And I'd have to say that Megan's comments about what the bindings look like is part

of the problem, really, because there is no real way of looking at the binding and the pores and the texture of it and making any kind of decision as to what it is. And we've been fooled by that a lot of times. I think the books from Brown where there had been some forensic person looking at them and said, oh, absolutely, this is human skin or absolutely it isn't. And that turned out to be wrong. And so we've kind of highlighted the fact that, well, there can be room for doubt in some of these things.

Yeah, and it makes sense, too, because Daniel is really dealing with a Eppendorf tube with some chunks in it, right? And for me, it can be a little bit more complicated and emotional because I am digging into the backgrounds of the books, right? So not only who owned them and how they got into the collection, but as much as I can about the creation of the books and the text. So I do get to spend a little bit more time with the stuff that sort of connects you to the people.

And the truth is, is that most of these books were created by doctors that were book collectors and felt entitled in this way because of the kind of clinical gaze you would call it about how before clinical medicine, you just had a few patients that you dealt with all the time in your village or whatever. You knew everyone in their families. Then around the French Revolution, this idea of clinical medicine came about where you would be able to learn at the bedside in a hospital and you would have a lot more patients. So you would be able to see a lot more things and you would be a better doctor as a result,

which everyone agrees is true. And if you don't actively work towards on making sure that you're constantly reminding yourself in a real way that these are people that you are dealing with and not collections of body parts and diseases to be cured, it's really easy to get this like distanced perspective of people and what's the worst that can happen? This is an example of what the worst is that can happen when you're so focused on these like tiny parts of a person that you're not really thinking of them as a person at all. And so for me, the ones that are the most moving are the ones where we've been able

to find any sort of information about who the person was or may have been. Right. Did you find that in writing your book, Dark Archive, that was part of the quest to write it at all? Yeah. The book as an object is kind of this incredible thing because as we learn from bio-coachology, it is this physical object that can contain tons of biological information from hundreds of years and it holds the information really well in a sort of stable way.

But it also contains stories not just of the person who wrote it, but the people who made the paper and put the book together and of their previous owners and their lives and the institutions that have owned these books and everything. And so there's like so many people who have touched the book at one way or another for any old book, let alone for one that actually is containing a part of a person. But I was like, I want to know more about like when we can, who these people were. Could I trace to find out in some cases who the doctor was that was involved in this? And so in terms of the humanity, I would say my favorite in that regard and anyone can

go online and look this up is at the Boston Athenaeum and their book is an ooze, a suede book. They were the only book, that was the only book I was not physically allowed to touch because suede in general suede bitings are a lot more likely to have conservation issues anyway. Anyone who has owned suede shoes and avoided puddles knows the suede anxiety. So imagine if you had a book made of human ooze, that's going to be in the no touchy police category.

But okay, a suede human skin book must be the most weirdly sadistic of the anthropodermic specimens, right? I'm just like afraid to hear this origin story. But the book is a narrative written by the person who whose skin it is, who actually requested this for themselves, which is as far as I can tell the only example of someone who actually wanted this done and had it done. He has a ton of aliases, but he was a person who died in prison and of tuberculosis. But he was this sort of charming, swashbuckling kind of highway robber.

The entire book is digitized on the Athenaeum's website so you can actually hear about his life in his own words. And I found him so charming in a way with this kind of, it was so interesting to hear how he would just constantly fool the prison guards and escape over and over again, but they still kind of loved him anyway. And then towards the end, it just sort of hits this sort of bulk. So this charming, incarcerated highway robber got too ill to dictate to the wardens any longer, and anyone who tried to write it for him just didn't have the same flair of

old George Walton, if that was his name. I call him Walton, but I mean truly he had five or six aliases on the cover of the book, including my favorite, is Burley Grove. I just think that's the best name ever. Yeah. It sounds like if Brad Pitt and Thelma and Louise got caught and then they made a beautiful suede book out of his beautiful body. What?

You really love that one, aren't you? Well, I may be in hell, darling, but you're the one stealing my heart. Yeah, so he made one for the doctor who removed the skin and everything, like he gave one to him as payment, okay, ew, but yes. But that one has never surfaced, so we have no idea what happened to the doctor book. But the other one was given to the family of the man who he found to be the bravest man that he ever robbed on the highway. Wow.

I have a whole chapter in my book about this guy's story because it was so compelling because it was, I had so much of his life because he gave it to us, you know, in this way. In Dark Archives, Meghan recounts how it fell into the hands of one of his greatest adversaries, blood buddies, and these two bros have one of the best meet cute scenes you've ever heard. I mean, what says BFF more than your printed deathbed confessional biography bound in your own suede for your friend to cherish as an heirloom? But there is a family lore there that apparently the family used to point to the book on the shelf and warn naughty children that if they misbehaved, they would be beaten with it.

Oh, damn. Oh, beaten with a skin book. Yeah. So much worse than a wooden spoon, so much worse than getting grounded. Sounds really effective and psychologically scarring, so I can understand why someone decided to donate it to a museum instead. They're like, you know what, you guys actually, you know what, you guys can just have it. Just take it.

You guys can just have it. But the process of tanning, a human, is it wildly different from a sheep or a cow or a pager? You know, I think it's pretty much the same as an animal would be. And when you read the few things you can find in the literature of a binder who's like, yeah, I found human skin books. What of it? We're like, oh yeah, I just did it in the normal fashion, right?

And then I'm like, what's the normal fashion? Because there are a lot of different ways to preserve skin and to make things that are leather or parchment, which is like less processed skin, but still like you could buy in a book in parchment. But you know, Alice, you had Alice Marcom on the show talking about how you can use brain and all sorts of things. Side note, see the Nassology episode about taxidermy. Lots of very moist, pulpy skinning and tanning info there.

And Alice Marcom is just a dream. You know, animal-dong brain, urine, all sorts of different naturally occurring gross things in order to make leather or leather-like treatments of stuff. So the actual mechanics of how artisans used to make things can get lost over time because they didn't really write these things down, right? They were like passed down through apprenticeships and stuff. So part of what I tried to uncover in the book, and it was sort of a last minute addition to the book.

I hadn't planned on doing it, but I kept getting asked, how would this have been made? And there was just this big kind of question mark over my head. So I found this guy, Jesse Meyer, up in upstate New York at this place called Pergamena. He's one of the few places in the United States that still does leather tanning in the historical fashion. And he let me come up and just like walked me through the process. And it was, I ruined a pair of shoes. How so?

I was wearing Keds, which was a poor choice, right? But sponsorship call me. Keds, jump right on that. Also I looked up Pergamena and it's this Hudson River Valley, cutest hell leather supplier. And should you want skins or parchment, they sell them straight up on their site. But Megan had heard about Pergamena through her friend Kevin, who had taken a tanning course there and been warned about what to expect when you visit. And Kevin said, boots, rubber.

So they told us to wear these like big waiter boots. And I thought, well, that seems like overkill and I'll see why I should have to do that. And then he's standing there and then they open this drum and then this like cascade of a fluvant like comes out and like washes by all their feet. And he said, I'm pretty sure that I saw some goat balls in that. And I said, Kevin, this is going to sound weird, but I feel like I need to see these goat balls for myself. Like I'm not going to be able to write this without being able to describe what it smells

like, what it looks like, thereby be able to sort of understand just how disgusting it is to take someone's skin and make a book out of them, right? Like that sort of disconnect that we have when we look at a book, a finished product in our hand and not think about how the cow became the book, right? Or how the person became the book. So then yeah, I went up there and yeah, the same kind of not quite like cascade, but he was walking me around from this drum to the, you know, the de-herring area to this place, to that place.

The stuff that was on the ground, I would say was sort of like Mountain Dew with like chunks of fat floating in it. You got a stooge on. That's what it looked like. It was like this yellow, bright, like non-natural yellow, green color. And I had rented a car to drive up to this place. And then I got, after I was all done and I spent hours there and then I got in the car and I went to drive back to Philadelphia and it smelled so bad that I was like, I'm not

going to get my deposit back on this car if I don't like get rid of these shoes. So I threw them in the trash can on the street and luckily I flip flops and put them on and drove down to Philadelphia with those. RIP, Philly Garbage Kids. Can I ask you Patreon questions? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, but before we simmer in those, a few words from sponsors who make it possible to donate to a cause.

And this week, Megan requested that it go to the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, BMMA, which is a national network of Black women-led organizations and professionals who work to ensure that all Black Mamas have their rights, respect, and resources to thrive before, during, and after pregnancy. And Black women and others who carry babies are three to four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white folks. And BMMA is composed of existing organizations and individuals whose work is deeply rooted in reproductive justice, birth justice, and the human rights framework.

So for more info, you can see the link in the show notes, blackmamasmatter.org. So thank you, Megan, for choosing them. And that was made possible by show sponsors who you may hear about now. Okay, you're pressing questions. I want to list all your names for this first question, but I would honestly have to print it in a book and just bind it in a slice of ham or something, like it was all of you. Okay. So here's another question we got.

Oh, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why. So many people want to know why. Yeah. I mean, why is the big question? Would I love to uncover the diary of a human skin bookmaker that says, this is my grand motivation for the reason why I thought this was totally cool to do? Yeah, I would love to know that. But the best I could come up with was really about the circumstances in which these doctors,

because the doctor bibliophiles were really the main people who were creating them, although I did mention a couple other kind of instances like the state creation of them in England for capital punishment reasons. But you know, what were the circumstances in Western Colomassum that allowed for multiple doctors who didn't know each other to feel like this was an okay thing to do and they didn't end up, you know, getting run out of town? Yeah. This next question was asked by a ton of you, including Mary Solato, first time questions

askers, A. and Emily Warner, as well as Marty Goodwin, R.J. Doidge, Kat Lindsay, Brendan Deen, Michael Sedenbaga, Nicholas Kemp, Big John, Jamie McNear, and Samantha Steeleman. And it's a really deep nagging existential question. This is another important question, very pressing, very much a hardball question. Hocus Pocus or Evil Dead. When it comes to cinematic depictions of books made of anthropodermic materials, have you seen either? I've seen both.

I had only just seen Hocus Pocus like this year. This is the spellbook of Winifred Sanderson. It was given to her by the devil himself. The book is bound in human skin and contains the recipes for her most powerful and evil spells. I get the picture. Okay. So, I think that some of its charm is probably lost on me as an old watching that movie,

right? Like, it's not as awesome as it would have been if I watched it when it first came out, I guess. I'm gonna go with Evil Dead also, you know. I just really like, I want to call him by his Instagram name because I'm totally blanking. It's like Shemp Malone. What's his real name? Bruce Campbell?

Bruce Campbell. Yes. Bruce Campbell, the chin. Yes. He's an amazing guy. He always just seemed like such the coolest guy. I have good friends back where I grew up in Philly that did 70s Grindhouse horror screenings and Bruce Campbell would come to the Evil Dead like screenings and he would sit there

until like four in the morning and talk to everybody and sign all their stuff. He just seems like such a great dude. So I'm just very pro Bruce Campbell, so I'm gonna go with Evil Dead. Do you want to get him a copy of Dark Archives? I do. Do you want to get him a copy of it? Let's get him a copy. Yeah.

Let's tweet at him. Yes. Hey, Bruce Campbell. Do you want her book? You should get a copy of her book. By the way, follow Bruce Campbell on Twitter at Groovy Bruce because like his films, he is just a delight in an otherwise hellscape. Groovy Bruce.

Okay. Elle McCall wants to know, do all of these books work best by the light of a black flame candle? Do you have to be reading them in a situation that is a little bit spooky? I think the best spooky situation I've read one in was at Brown because there is this really tall, the reading room has these super tall windows and it looks out on this field and the field is like rolling with fog. And I was like, this is good.

This is correct. Okay, this next question, a little bit scientific, was asked by patrons Carrie, Jessica Beard, Dorit, Laura Donnelly, Nick McCash, Kathleen B, Megan Walker, Samantha Jay Gunther, Jess Swan. So many people had similar questions and they all want to know, in Jessica Beard's words, after the tanning and the binding of the books, not to mention the passage of time, how intact is the DNA? Do you find the skin donor?

Can you see if there are living relatives? How intact is that? That's not very likely because the DNA doesn't survive very well over time and especially with any chemicals and other treatments that would go into making the binding. So DNA is of the material itself, of the leather material. I don't know of any cases offhand that have done that. And the reason we use the protein, the collagen protein, because that survives very nicely over very long periods of time.

So far, no one that I'm aware of has dug into that level of information. With the protein analysis, all we can say is that as human, we can't say whether it's a male or female or old or young or anything else about it. Yeah, I figured that would probably be something that would be like the next step or something that was executed. That's a horrible use of the word executed, you know, if it were possible. But yeah, it seems like that would be pretty rough on those double helix. Well, another limitation is that the DNA testing generally requires a lot more material, so

that might be prohibitive. Liz Powell and Kayla McNabb want to know, are human leather books legal to own? That's a great question. I went down a big rabbit hole. If you ever want to know anything about legality of various body disposition methods, I highly recommend checking out Tanya Marsh. She literally wrote the book on the subject called The Law of Human Remains, and she helped me walk through the process in the book of trying to determine, is it legal to own human

skin books in various places, or would it be legal to create one now that we live in an age where there's consent around your body, right? So these were all made with the exception of Walton. These were all made without, not only without consent, but without the concept that you would have consent over your body, right? It wasn't a thing that was a legal, you know, construct that existed, which is so, it seems so crucial to our understanding of what our rights are today. It's hard to believe.

It's hard to put ourselves in the mindset of a time where that didn't exist, right? So in terms of ownership, in the U.S., it's really state-based. What is considered desecration of a corpse? And so, because in different points in history, a cremation would have been considered desecration of a corpse. We're often judged by what's called community standards. So it's not expressly, human skin books are illegal to make, but it would be, if you made one and someone caught you, what could they say that you violated community standards

and desecrated a corpse? And do you really want to be on the other side of that, you know, potential lawsuit? A lot of times, the law is complaint-based, right? So it's sort of hairy. But then, again, poor choice of words for that. No skin off my butt. But the other thing is like, are they legal to own and sell the antique ones? And it was actually kind of fascinating that the different countries where I found human

skin books, all of them have kind of different rules and different lines where they draw what is an acceptable kind of human remain to sell or not sell, or what is even considered a human remain. So Scottish law is stricter than English law about human remains, and the French are the strictest of all. And that is part of the reason why I think we get a lot of emails from private collectors, French private collectors who are interested in potentially testing books, because they have to be sort of hush-hush about even having an alleged book because if someone knew you

had one, that's like not legal to own. Yeah. So, Megan mentioned Britain's Human Tissue Act, which I'll just summarize the very complicated legal and ethical texts. Essentially, it means if it falls off you or out of you and you're still cool to hang, we're good. So, you know, teeth, hair, nails, you do regrow skin. And to anyone who's listened to the last two weeks of the end of the episode secrets,

you know some of us have some extra to spare. But tattoos don't just fall off. Who asked about those? Patrons Corrin, Lulu Hall, Stephanie Breherty's, Kelsey Naffa, Eileen Prince, Hannah Quist, Maria Hancox, Maria Pejesic, first-time question-asker, Luke LaFamina, Hope, Jen Woods, Adrian Hollister, Megan Moore, Ariana Mattson, Karen Burnham, and Kat Lindsay. And actually on the topic of tattoos, first-time question-asker Amy Robeson, as well as a ton of other patrons want to know, can you use tattooed skin?

Does that ever show up in any of these human skin books? I'm going to guess no? Yes. Oh! I'm really hoping for the day, my little email pings and I hear from one of these private collectors, but while I was at the Bibliothèque Nationale in France, I came across this book about history of bookbindings. And in the French book, there were pictures of books that clearly had tattoos on them.

And so I'm thinking, okay, did someone tattoo a cow? I kind of doubt it. I feel like this is probably real, but they're these not good pictures, black and white pictures, and they just say stuff like someone's initial and their last name of their private collection, but there's no me trying to find out who that person was and see where that book might have ended up, especially in France where they're illegal, makes it really, really hard to find. I've not actually seen in real life a book that was bound in human skin that has a tattoo, but I've seen a picture of something that very much looked like that could be the case.

This next question I was sure was just from a work of fiction. Asia Yeager wants to know, what's up with that one story about the human skin being stored in a basement lab and being cured with urine? Was it even a lab or was it just someone's basement? I'm pretty sure the skin was made into like five books. Am I just making that up? They ask. Do you have any idea what they're talking about?

Yes. Oh, okay. They're talking about three of the five books at the Muter Museum, the College of Physicians, Philadelphia Historical Medical Library, which is also where the Muter Museum is. So the books are actually part of the library, not the museum, but they're all in one building together. Books were all made by the same guy, John Stockton Huff. He allegedly had saved the skin of a woman who the previous librarian there, Beth Lanter,

was able to trace in the archives to name her as Mary Lynch. So it was like three pieces of the spine binding from the same person because Dr. Huff had like written inside the book that it was made from the skin of Mary L and like what hospital she was from. So then the librarian was able to go back and find Mary Lynch from the certain area and be able to put two and two together. The three books bound from Mary Lynch were historical works from the 16 and 1700s about what else?

Women's health and childbirth. So Dr. Huff himself is said to have lost his own wife in childbirth and though rates of maternal mortality have lowered a lot since that era, some groups are safer than others. And so for more on that, once again, see blackmamasmatter.org. Now in terms of Mary's timeline from autopsy to library, it was not like a wet jar of skin in urine and abasement. And this is part of what I worked through with the Tanner was how exactly he would have been able to save the skin for what was a really long time before he actually bound

the books. And so he believes that he may have used urine to just stop the skin decay process because skin can decay super, super quickly. You can arrest the decay just long enough and then you have to like change the pH before you just disintegrate it, you know? So you can stop it until you get it to the place where then you can do regular leather tanning type processes on it to keep it. And it was probably the tanned piece of dry leather that was kept for a long time before

he actually bound the books. This actually devtails nicely with another listener question. First time question asker Pascal Lanffier-Burbonnet wants to know, does a book with human skin smell different depending on the person it's made out of? No. Okay. They don't smell like anything. Okay.

I didn't think so, but it's a good question just to get out of it. Well, you know, they smell like old books. Yeah. They smell like lovely kind of broken vanilla smell, but not a jar of urine. Right. It's good to know. Oh, Ella, you could put all these books on a shelf with a whole bunch of other books and you would never be able to pick them out.

They're absolutely normal looking, normal smelling, normal feeling. And I've handled a lot of them. I handled all the books at Brown and at the Mootr, even the one at the Athenaeum and a few other ones. But we really would never know that they were human skin. Daniel and Megan say, depending on how well it was tanned, different animal leathers can have really similar durabilities. But what if you wanted a modern, ethically sourced human wallet or belt?

I mentioned this in the Cosmetology episode, but humanleather.com has got you covered selling these items with raw materials donated by folks who consented before their demise. I could not find a price list, but they do note on the website that they take only Bitcoin. Sounds above board. Now, there's also a project called Pure Human, which examines the biotech of using DNA samples to lab grow human leathers of specific people with prototypes made to reflect the skin of late fashion designer Alexander McQueen. And Pure Human is looking to explore the commodification of human flesh as a new form of luxury, which

is just a little rich for some budgets, I'm sure. Now, provided it was willed to you, is there like a hack for this process, like DIY? A few people had kind of Pinterest-y DIY questions. Travis Brooks and Michael Hamby want to know, how much skin does it take to bind a book? Travis says they're $5.9 and $1.70. How many books could I bind? I guess with their own skin. I mean, was there not a lot of like square inches used in this?

Yeah, I guess a lot of the books that I've seen are about the size slightly larger than your modern iPhone, right? A lot of them are not very big. Or there are parts of them that are, it's just the binding, you know, just like this little strip that you could get. However, there is one book that I cannot, I still kind of blows my mind and said, Brown, it's this Vesalius, so, you know, anatomy book. It's huge, and the entire thing is covered in skin, and I cannot figure out how they

did it. Yikes. It's 32 centimeters. That's about a foot. Oh man, an opportune unit of measurement there, but yes, 12 inches. I picked it out of its box, and it was so much bigger than any of the other ones I had seen. I was like, yeah, there's no way that this is real.

It was very fancy looking, and it was real. Actually speaking of that, listener Anna Kinjeniek wants to know, what is the worst of a human leather bound book? Is, you know, is that even measurable because we're talking about a life or talking about typically stolen property, all kinds of things. Is there monetary value put on these? The best that I can say, because it changes all the time, would be that humans, if you had the same exact, like, addition of a book, and one was just bound in leather, and one

was allegedly bound in human skin, the human skin one would be worth many times over what the regular one would be because of the scarcity of it, right? That it's just scarcity equals value in certain ways. There is probably a buyer out there who would be interested in having this kind of object, right? And that's part of the reason why a lot of the fakes that we see are in the occult market. Because the idea of having a spell book that is, or a book about the devil or something like that is bound in human skin is very appealing, but it turns out that it's usually no one

actually who is making an occult book maybe had that access to a doctor at a certain point who would be able to steal that skin for you. So I don't think we have yet to affirm an occult book that is actually bound in skin. So if you bought a spell book at Hot Topic, you got hosed. Yes. Good. And especially the hocus pocus one with the eyeball in it. Yeah.

Bad news. Probably fake. Any levity aside, moving on to something that is very real and very unsettling. A lot of people had a really good question. Catherine Gilbert and Sarah Howell Miller both wanted to know, are certain pigmented skins used more than others? Sarah Howell Miller asked, okay, but for real, racism has got to show up in here somewhere, right?

What type of evidence for some type of just other than the abject cruelty of taking something without consent to find anything in that vein again? Yeah. So I was really, I tried to be extremely careful to get this as complete as I could without speculating things in the book. So there's a chapter in the book which deals with any of the books that have any sort of racial claim or connotation to them. Thus far, any of the books that we had tested that said something, where a note said something

about the race of the person who was used for the book, like bound in the skin of a Moorish chieftain or something like that, have tested to be fake. Not human at all. But then there are a few books that we stopped and tested, of course, so I can't totally say blanket statement. There are two confirmed books that are poetry books by Phyllis Wheatley, who was the first African American published woman in the United States in colonial times. And so when I started digging into the problem with these books, I'm kind of holding my breath

like, you know, what am I going to find here? The bookseller who put the bindings on those books was someone who was like a huge proponent of trying to save works of Southern writers and African American writers and build a market for people to want to buy them and collect them in libraries. And so he would do things like he would put famous authors' works into incongruently expensive bindings like Japanese vellum. Like, why would you bind Phyllis Wheatley's work in Japanese vellum? Because Japanese vellum is expensive.

So why did he send three books, but we've lost track of one to a binder using leather supplied and then two of them end up being human? From the evidence I could find, it seemed to just be that it would add like monetary collectible value to it. But he's still got that skim from somebody, right? So there is a big kind of question mark there, but he used to work with these writers from the Harlem Renaissance, and he was like really seen as a champion of black literature. Really murky.

Well, one of the things is that you can't really tell by looking at a book what the color of the skin of the person was before it became leather. When you take off the top epidermal layer, everyone's skin looks the same. And you can dye leather any color under the sun. And now, of course, because there isn't any confirmation of this practice does not mean it doesn't exist. And there's a very high likelihood that they do. In fact, during a boom in anatomy and medical advancements in the late 1800s, human cadavers

were sold and stolen at alarming rates. And those who were victims of social oppression or had fewer economic resources were the most vulnerable to those practices. Now in terms of finding out who are these people who are bound for centuries around poetry and prose, DNA testing has its limits from a chemical perspective. It's just not as robust as collagen proteins. And even if it were sequenced, Megan says. Testing DNA is not a really good way of judging what race a person would have been perceived

as because race is a social construct, really. I would never say, no, this never had any racial elements to it because we know that marginalized communities were abused by the medical profession throughout the history of clinical medicine and continue to have those effects to this day. One enduring example of this are the cells of Henrietta Lacks, who was a 31-year-old woman who died in 1951 and whose cells divided rapidly and they were dubbed immortal. But they were obtained without consent from a doctor as she was undergoing cancer treatment. Now since that discovery, HeLa for Henrietta Lacks cells have been used in thousands and

thousands of experiments for biomedical research involving cancer therapy and virology, product testing, and millions of metric tons of her cells have been cultured and used for therapies that have made billions of dollars. And her family only found out about HeLa cells 25 years after her death and they never gave consent nor received compensation. And Oprah Winfrey was a producer on the 2017 film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I would now like to see. All right, as long as we are sad and angry, let's stay in that zone for a sec.

What is the most annoying thing or the worst thing or the thing you hate the most about this work? And I will ask your favorite after. Do you want to go first, Daniel? Well, I can't think of anything that annoys me about it. I enjoy the analysis. The reason I do what I do is because I like to solve little mysteries, and these are always little mysteries that come along.

I've read every one of Agatha Christie's books and probably reread several of them. The thing that motivates me is, as Megan said very early on, we're finding knowledge or we're uncovering knowledge that's there to be uncovered, but it hasn't been yet. And that's kind of the exciting part. I really can't think of any downsides. Sorry. Scraping books, doing some peptide mass fingerprinting, maybe listening to Jams as he does. I like to picture Dr. Kirby just waiting for the drop on some EDM as his centrifuge reaches

full speed. What about you, Megan? I would say the downside is that sometimes because people are rightly like have big reactions to hearing about books about a human skin, the concept of it, they're like, ew, no. And then they project on to me as if I'm trying to go into the human skin book binding business or something. Like, like, oh, how dare you? That's disgusting.

And I'm like, you know, I didn't make these, right? And I'm not saying that we should, but I study them and it's okay to study things that are disgusting without then becoming yourself disgusting, right? So that's the thing that, you know, sometimes people have such huge reactions that they end up being kind of mean. That would be the bad part. Or they're like, oh, is your book also bound in human skin? And so my go-to is like, are you volunteering?

But, you know, of course, that's a joke people would make, I get it. And I'm the only one who hears it all the time, so it's not a problem. But the best part, I would say moralized with Daniel is just sort of that, the thrill of the, of the like, tracking down a book and learning all the things about it and then actually being able to answer a question about it that anyone could have researched provenance and learned a lot about a book before. But this is the first time we can learn this part of it, this part of its story. And I know that you get asked if it's bound in human skin, but I have to ask, given the

topic, would you ever want it bound in your own skin after you depart? No. Okay. I wouldn't want that. However, there, I have considered, because, you know, one of our other team members is the wonderful Anna Dodie, who's the director at the Mooder Museum, and as my book finishing present to myself, I got a tattoo on my arm that is basically like a collaboration of a couple things that were on book plates of some of the books that I was researching at

the Mooder. And it's also kind of this, the logo for the library at, at the College of Positions. So it's got like a book with a skull on top and like a moth. And then it's got a banner that says Kassasia, like what do I know, which is Montaigne. And I showed it to Anna. She's like, that's jar worthy. She's like, if you want to donate it to the museum, I'd be happy to take it. And I'm like, that's weird in a way that I get and understand.

And also because that is, you know, there are all these fascinating people that are in the Mooder Museum. And it's one of my favorite places because so fascinating that this idea of, you know, being there forever because you decided to be there is kind of interesting to me. But I don't know. I am not signing over any, any tattoo preservation paperwork just yet. You got some time. This has been an absolute joy, despite the topic.

I mean, what a way to treat a topic that is otherwise a little spooky and grim, but absolutely fascinating. You guys are doing awesome work and congratulations on the book. Thank you for all the science that you're doing. Ellie, thank you so much. You know what I always say, y'all? Cut bangs, texture crush. Ask smart experts about human leather, stupid questions because we're all just alive purses

crammed with organs and thoughts. So Megan Rosenblum is on Twitter and Instagram. She's at library at night and her book Dark Archives, a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin is released October 20th. That's right. That's tomorrow. You'll see an advance copy. It is charming and respectful and informative.

And if you like Mary Roach, you'll love this book. Mary Roach even blurbed it. And there is a mention of your own Dad Ward and the Allergies podcast in it. So keep your eyes peeled for that. There are links to her stuff in the show notes as well as to blackmamasmatter.org. I'm Allie Ward with 1L on Twitter and Instagram and Allergies is at Allergies on both merch is available at allergiesmerch.com. That's managed by the lovely Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch who also hosts the Kami

podcast, You Are That. Erin Talbert admins the Allergies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Emily White and all the transcribers who make transcripts available for free at alleyward.com. There's a link right to them in the show notes. Caleb Patton bleeps the episodes so they're kid friendly and thank you to Noel Dillworth who keeps tabs on schedules and to assistant editor Jared Sleeper who is around for so much moral support day to day.

And of course, lead editor and top stash Stephen Ray Morris of The Percast and C. Jurassic Wright who pieces together all my slices and dices each week. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music and this week I blissfully have no foot skin secrets for you. But I do want to say if I ever write a book of my swashbuckling adventures or like a pocket guide to insect friends, I would not be mad if you all bound it in my back skin. I mean I'm done with it anyway, at that point, have at it. It's like leftover lunch fries, get it.

Okay, be safe, get ready for next week's final 2020 Spooktober episode. Also please vote. Okay, bye-bye. Pack a dermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, letology, amtechnology, meteorology, rheumatology, vampology, seriology, selenology.