Human remains: anthropodermic bibliopegy and the appeal of the extreme in challenging the continuing external management of Indigenous remains.

The title of this discussion paper is deliberately sensational, inviting
the reader into an investigation of horrific tomes covered in human
skin. In May, 2006 an article which made front page headlines in the
United Kingdom, also did the rounds of the international press. It
highlighted the gruesome discovery, of an anatomy text covered in
the human skin of what was presumably an eighteenth-century victim
of bibliological, rather than biblical, proportions (BBC News Online
2006). More interesting than the form and content of the find, which
as any biblio-historian would know was common-place as a means of
literally contextualising the material and often little more than a curio in
intention, is the public reaction and moral lesson that the editorial and
dissemination promotes—to transform and manage human remains
into a simulacrum of animal skin is wrong.