Religatum de Pelle Humana - Jeremy Norman's HistoryofScience.com

140 Bibliologia Comica
known of which was George Walton. While waiting for the
gallows, Walton, a Jamaican mulatto with an unenviable
reputation as a highwayman, gave a signed statement to the
warden of the Massachusetts State Prison, and this document
was published in 1837 by Harrington and Company of Boston
as a slender thirty-page octavo. Shortly after Walton's execution,
his tanned hide was delivered to Peter Low, an English
binder who had established himself in the Old Corner Book
Store. Low matched up the gruesome hide with the lurid
contents of the owner's statement, and today this volume, with
an inscription reading "Hic Liber Waltonis Cute Compactus
Est" rests in the Trustee's Room of the Athenaeum.
Yes, there are others. lndeed, autoanthropodermic binding
has its own little cubbyhole in the field of bibilopegy. Back
in the days of a happier Berlin of 1913 and 1914 this subject
came up in the lively discussions of anthropodermic bindings
in the "Kunst and Wissenschaff' column of the Berliner
Tageblatt; and Bogeng, who could never resist the opportunity
to express himself on such occasions, put down a few original
speculations on the matter:
Maybe the ambition of bibliophiles. feverishly aroused by
the newspaper stories, will turn to a problem never yet solved:
the library of books bound in the skin of their own authors.
But this library will probably always remain a pious wish,
unfulfilled because of the caprice of the object and not of the
subjel:::t. 7 5
Essad Bey reHected on the destiny of W alton' s mortal remains
and stated his personal conviction that even though
sorne might find this practice "repulsive, yes, even immoral,"
he himself believed that beneath the surface there was a
"good spot of piety, of old, coarse romanticism ... " Those
who seek the romantic will probably find no tale of autoanthropodermic
bibliopegy quite so fascinating as the story
of Percy Fitzgerald in his Book F ancier about an unidentified
Russian poet who fell from his horse and suffered amputation
of a lower extremity which he promptly had Hayed and