Ed Gein would have loved this! And on other skin related fronts, there’s this.

Human Skin-Covered Book With ‘Ghost Face’ Up for Auction

A 400-year-old book covered in a sheet of wrinkled human skin is going under the hammer in a bizarre auction.

It is thought the skin was cut from the corpse of one of Guy Fawkes’ fellow conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, an attempt to blow up the British Parliament in a bid to kill King James I.

And if you hold the novel in the right light, you might even see a ghostly face on the cover, it is claimed.

Called “A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings Against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet A Jesuit and His Confederates,” it tells of the grisly end met by the Gunpowder Plotters. Fawkes prepared the explosives for the event and is remembered annually in the U.K. on Nov. 5 with fireworks.

It was published in 1606, just months after the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet was captured and executed for his part in the plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

The book’s owner, who does not want to be identified, told Sky News he hopes it will go to a museum so that people can see it.

He believes that marks on the leather are evidence of torture, and says a Latin inscription on the cover which reads “severe penitence punished the flesh” was written to make sure people knew what had happened to the victim.

Sid Wilkinson, of Wilkinson’s Auctioneers in Doncaster, said the ancient human skin feels smooth “and a little bit strange to the touch.”

Several other books covered in dead people’s skin are held in museums around the world.

The practice, known as anthropodermic bibliopegy, had a novelty value hundreds of years ago. The most popular were court reports of murders that were covered in the skin of the perpetrator.



  1. Personality says:

    It’s only leather. No big deal.

  2. #1 – Personality,

    Yup.

    However, if I was going to pick a book that really made my skin crawl, it would almost certainly be a religious work, regardless of the material on which it is printed or the materials with which it is bound and covered.

  3. Li says:

    A subtext of some of the history I’ve read on this incident is the chance that Fawkes was a stooge, hired by the king, to serve as an excuse to round up the enemies of the crown and torture them to death. In the modern spook terminology, it may have been a “false flag” attack.

    So, we have star chambers, torture, executive judgement, and no habeus corpus right now; how long before they are binding books in human skin again? Perhaps soon they will find an anti-WTO protester, or a Ron Paul supporter, with a pile of powder and a match somewhere. After all, it would be -such a shame- if our leaders don’t get to use those concentration camps the taxpayers have paid KBR for.

  4. Gasbag says:

    Should this thing be on E bay?


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