 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Ginny Steele, the Norman and Armina Powell University librarian at UCLA. Delighted to welcome you all today to our October book talk. We're very happy to have you with us virtually, although we do still wish we could be in person, but at some point we will be able to have in-person events again. I'm excited today about our speaker, one of our librarians, who is going to talk about a book that she has written. But before we get to that, first a little bit of housekeeping, which is to say that if you would like to view the closed captioning for this session, if you click on the closed caption button at the bottom of your screen, you'll be able to turn the subtitles on. Also, we will have a few minutes for questions and answers at the end of our session, and we will use the Q&A function. So if you look at the bottom of your screen, you'll see the second from the right button is Q&A. Just click on that and you'll be able to type your question in. So as you know, fall quarter started just relatively short time ago, and most classes at UCLA are being delivered remotely, and the libraries continue to be closed physically. But we have a lot of people working very hard to deliver our services and programs at a distance. So we're doing a lot of online instruction. As you are aware, the library supports all disciplines that are taught at UCLA, as well as all the research that goes on at UCLA. So there are more than 210 majors and minors, as well as graduate programs in a number of the professional schools and also in the college. And we support all of those. We do hundreds of instructional sessions every year and we reach thousands of students. We also support hundreds of research projects. We work directly with students and faculty. We offer a range of different services, including research consultations. This summer launched digitization on request program. We are mailing materials to people and we are in the process of launching a page and pickup service. So we are doing everything we can to try to provide as much access to the UCLA library during this time, even though the buildings are closed. We don't know when the libraries will be able to reopen. We have to get approval from the County Department of Public Health, and no one knows when that's going to happen. So for the time being, we're just offering everything remotely and very pleased. And I have to say, I'm so gratified and proud of everyone in the library who has worked so hard to make it possible for us to really switch overnight to be able to function in this new mode of doing work. So as part of that, we're very happy to have you here today with us. You are very important to us. You are tremendous supporters of the library. And given the budget constraints we are facing, we are going to rely on your support more and more in the future to support all the scholars all the researchers all the students who use our library collections. So it's very important to us to have your support and I want you to know how deeply grateful we are to you for all that you do. You're our friends, you're actually part of the UCLA library family. So we feel very happy to be with you today. Our speaker today is Megan Rosenblum, who is one of our librarians, and she has written a book about a topic that she is deeply interested in that I'm very eager to hear her discuss. I have not yet read the book but I intend to and I look forward to hearing what Megan has to say about a relatively new field of bio codicology. This is another example of how libraries and library collections support new lines of inquiry in different ways so I'm very happy to turn the floor over to Megan, and as I said we'll have q amp a at the end so Megan over to you. Hi, everyone. How's my volume good. Great. I thank you Jenny so much and thanks to everyone for welcoming me, welcoming me here today to talk a little bit about my book. I joined the UCLA library really recently in July as collection strategies librarian. My role here is to look broadly at the collections across our campus libraries and find ways of assessing and building collections that reflect our values and research and instruction priorities. The library collects broadly and deeply and strategically to meet the needs in every discipline for of our students faculty and researchers today, but we also have to look ahead to anticipate how we can meet their future research needs. So sometimes that means focusing on making collections as inclusive as possible, sometimes it's in acquiring materials to serve increasingly interdisciplinary research work. And sometimes it's encouraging researchers use of our vast corpus of collection materials and new and interesting ways, for example, text data mining. So my research as described in dark archives, a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin. You know, as funny as it sounds it is an example of all of these elements at work right it's looking at the power dynamics I play between the 19th century Dr bibliophiles who created these books and the marginalized people they were made from the work of my interdisciplinary chemists librarians and museum curators is as interdisciplinary as it gets, including the fields of book history proteomics history of a number of countries and time periods medical ethics and history and material culture just to name a few. And we interrogate you long held library collections using scientific applications to learn something previously unknowable about them. Without strong academic library research collections carefully preserved and made accessible work like mine could never exist. So now I'd like to jump in and give you an idea of what about what this book is all about. And get to slide there. So, there is a believer not there's a 50 cent phrase for books bound in human skin, it's anthro human, dermic skin, Biblio probably familiar book, and veggie which is to fasten or to bind so human skin book binding is anthropodermic bibliophagy. And this picture is an example of confirmed anthropodermic bibliophagy at Brown University's Hay Library. This is, I included this book, the picture of this book is the only picture of a human skin book inside my book but the other ones that you'll see today are sort of exclusive, you know, photos. Why is this history of medicine, I didn't mention up top that you know there were doctor bibliophiles involved. But the rumors around human about their being books bound in human skin actually started at the same time that clinical medicine started which is around the French Revolution. And at the same time that artisan guilds were were becoming, they were kind of breaking up rules about what it took to get into certain professions, the rules for becoming a doctor actually became a lot more strict. And so they changed, you know, previously it was more of an apprenticeship situation you didn't need any specific previous training, you would learn from someone who knew before. And then you would just go off and do medicine for, you know, probably small groups of rich people, the hospitals were more charity hospitals for the poorest people who didn't have, you know, couldn't afford a private doctor. And during the French Revolution, they started thinking, okay, if we instead of the apprentice situation we had doctors learning at the bedside of these poor people in the clinic in the clinic in the hospital. They would see a lot more patients they would be able to learn a lot better and have see like a broader array of information. And also that they should be doing dissection cadaver study to learn how internal organs work and and you know how the body is situated. And then, so those things together, along with the development of increasing like new ways, diagnostic tools, things like the stethoscope and things like that, to be able to suddenly know more about what is going on with a patient's body than what the patient can alone tell them. Then doctors, you know, this is an unalloyed good for sure that that medicine became clinical in this way and became more rigorous. And also they were requiring that you had actual scientific, you know, chemistry classes and things like that before you got to med school. So this Paris school they called it because it was developed in Paris is still pretty much the framework that we teach medicine today. And this was good, obviously is more scientific, more rigorous, more consistent, but Foucault, Michelle Foucault says that what also was a unusual side effect that developed was this thing called the clinical gaze that because of the results of the clinic and you're seeing a lot more patients and you have these new ways of looking at patients, that it became very easy to start to lose sight of the humanity of a patient when you're very laser focused on organs, and, you know, their organs and how they were being treated or a disease to be cured. And so, decades after the rumors of the French Revolution books, which I will get back to those a little later in the talk, we have examples of actual human skin books being made. And, you know, with the elevation of the medical profession doctors also started to do more gentlemanly kind of pursuits like collecting art and collecting books. So the clinical gaze when I'm going unchecked, plus this sort of acquisitive collectors mindset came together in this very unusual, like unexpected way to result in Dr. Charles who when they're performing dissections didn't see it as didn't see anything wrong with just saving an extra piece of skin to use to bind one of their favorite books later and collect, you know, create a truly unique collectors item further for themselves. But, you know, serial killer Hannibal Lecter kind of doctors these were well respected doctors in their field. And so, these all resulted in a time when actual human skin books did get created. So here's a photo. Brown University of Andreas Vesalius is, you know, master work in anatomy. The, this would have been, you know, owned by a doctor, you know, one of the foundational works of medicine and then he got it rebound in this blind and gold tooled human skin. So these books were kind of a known, like an open secret on shelves and libraries and museums around America and Europe. But they were also kind of, you know, a lot of people thought that maybe they were just outlandish claims that they weren't really, you know, real no one really believes that there was really no way of knowing until in 2014 at Harvard University. They, a chemist named Daniel Kirby was working with their preservation lab, and he realized, or he was asked whether his tests that, you know, a well developed proteomics test that he was using for some other, you know, identifications of leather, whether that might actually work to do identifications on Harvard's three alleged human skin bindings. And so they tested those three bindings and two of them turned out to be not human turned out to be an animal but one of them turned out to be real human skin and it's this book here. And that just sort of sent shockwaves through the library world, because people had a pretty big reaction to the news that we knew for sure that at least at one time someone had created, you know, actual human skin book. And so, when I was doing some research and I went to interview Daniel, and then we started talking together about the ones we had heard of. And wouldn't it be interesting to see how many of these we could find out, you know, whether Harvard's is the only one or if there are some of these other kind of rumors turn out to be true. And so we kind of joined forces to work on this together. So here's a picture Daniel with his little up and door to with a book sample inside. This is a scientific test. It's called it comes from field of proteomics which I mentioned which is analyzing proteins and in this particular case it's the collagen in in the leather and that's called peptide mass fingerprinting or PMF, and it is technically destructive but very minimally so. When you take a piece off of the binding. If it is bigger than that little spec above able to link its head then it's plenty big for the test. It gets digested into an enzyme called trips in and run through mass spectrometer and what you get back is this sort of array of peaks and valleys on a, you know, chart, and then you can match that to a known library of animal, you know, samples and what however the PMF shows up, you know the top one shows you what a human, what human skin looks like, and then a human skin and the lower one shows you what cheap collagen looks like which is the most likely culprit of being a fake human skin book because before the only way you would really be able to know whether something was maybe allegedly bound in human skin was if someone at some point wrote inside the book bound in human skin. That was pretty much all you had to go on. There's no real way of knowing what a human skin book would look like just by looking at it. If they were on a shelf with other antique books you really wouldn't be able to tell. So for the Anthropodermic Book Project our current figures are that we have identified 50 alleged anthropodermic books in public libraries and museums. And so I say alleged where it's not just, oh we heard there might be a book by so and so, but in actual we were able to identify the actual individual item that has this dark sort of pedigree. And of those books, then we tested 31 of them and 18 have been confirmed as human skin and 13 have come out to be other animals. We have also the team has also tested some done some tests for private collectors and we also test some non book of alleged human skin objects of various kinds. So, before I came to UCLA library I did actually test a book from UCLA library that was allegedly bound in human skin. Thanks to my colleague Heather Briston for coming through with the photos on this during quarantine so big help there. This book comes from that same sort of area of the French Revolution alleged human skin book. And so you can see here, you know what the binding looks like here on the right, and then the former owners. One was Armand Jerome beyond who is Louis 15th's librarian he comes up a lot in these sort of rumors about human skin books. And you can see on the left, there is a number of notes written inside about, you know, previous owners, and then the tell tale in French really a man, you know, binding in human skin. This book is a about it's a 17th century book about the, you know, movements and sort of geography of the city of Messina. And after it was apparently owned by being all went to James, it was bought by James Westfell Thompson. Now he was a medieval medievalist historian he also wrote on the history of reading and literacy, and he wrote a lot on the French Revolution and now he might be interested in owning such a thing personally. He was a professor at UC Berkeley, and then this book went to the UC Berkeley collection and at some point made its way to UCLA. That is not the only book that was in the UC system that was allegedly bound in human skin there was also another one at UC Berkeley. I'll be talking about that at Berkeley next week. So both of these books from this French Revolutionary era after testing turned out to not be real human skin. But you can see that the case binding up on the left are not case binding like they the box a clamshell box that the book is stored in says, you know, has a title and then there's a skin binding underneath. So it just goes to show you that, you know, there was, we now know something about this book that was unable to be known previously. And I think that that's just as fun and interesting as as the real thing. So, I'm going to give a little, I'm going to do a little reading from my book from the prologue of my book. And I wanted to just mentioned that some in the reading I'll be talking about I will mention some tests that our team has undertaken at the Huntington library also in this area and Sam Marina of an alleged human skin book and a human skin object. And then I will kind of also be talking about that new field of biocodicology that Jenny mentioned in the intro, and how academic library collections are being used in some previously unforeseen ways, and how important it is to, you know, preserve and protect and create access to these collections for all the interesting ways that researchers will be able to use them in the future. So, here's, here I go for the reading part. In the five years since our first PMF testing of human skin books, a new field called biocodicology has emerged, where the physical structures of books are studied with tools using proteins, genes and microorganisms and their genes. And this exciting work can not only tell us about new facts, new facts about the books production, but offer glimpses into the old world where the books were created, including ancient animal husbandry practices and evidence of plague, and some poor scribes meager lunch on 1630 death registers, even in the fields where the results and future possibilities are enticing. Most biocodical biocodicological studies so far have focused on parchment, which is animal skin that has been preserved by stretching scraping and drying but that has not been subjected to the harsh chemical processes of them. Therefore, much more of the DNA and parchment books, book covers or pages remains intact. Many parchment books are from the medieval era, and the institutions that house them often have very strict policies regarding destructive sampling, even if the sample would barely be visible to the naked eye. Biocodicologists have been pioneering non-destructive methods of gathering DNA from eraser rubbings on parchment, a method a team will investigate in the future to see if it works equally well in the most unusual circumstance of tanned human leather. It's always best when working with historical artifacts to use the methods that are the least invasive but still get the job done. The most cutting edge next gen DNA sequencing methods also cost more than many institutions or individual collectors can afford, whereas the cost of PMF testing is marginal to those with access to the equipment and can be taught to conservators and curators who are not lab scientists. If these future avenues prove resistant to contamination from human handling, we might be able to learn more about the people who were made into these books like their biological sex. PMF testing is a very inexpensive and reliable method for distinguishing human skin leather from other animals and research into an individual book's provenance is our primary means of filling in historical gaps. Being on the front lines of this intersection of history and science is nothing short of thrilling. Discovering every test result feels like opening a present on Christmas morning. When we had the Huntington's PMF results in hand they confirmed my hunches in both cases. Anatomy epitomized and illustrated was bound in real human skin in keeping with this medical provenance. The Swatland note was written on cow hide. So what would someone lie about making something of human skin in short money, the scarcity of an object made of human skin and the attendant morbid curiosity drive its value. The PMF result calls into question all sorts of things about the Swatland note. Is it even from the 18th century or did someone create it later on later on to capitalize on sweatlands cat captivity narrative. The association with such a narrative truly American genre that recounted harrowing tales of kidnappings, usually by people of a different race from the victim point to a possibly darker motivation. Scholars have argued that the captivity narrative helped demonize Native Americans and justify manifest destiny to the West. Is this note an example of that mindset and action. Likely I will ever find a smoking gun, such as a letter from a human skin object forger that handily details the creators motivations, I wish it is the ambiguity in the motivations behind the frauds that makes the fakes as intriguing to me as the real deal. Just over half of the objects we've tested so far I've been made out of real human skin. So there are a great number of fakes out there. They all add a piece to the puzzle of the phenomenon of anthropodermic bibliophagy and the context in the history of medicine in which these books could be created. These human skin books force us to consider how we approach death and illness and what we owe to those who have been wronged or used by medical practitioners. It is my job and my privilege to help cultivate multiple ways of thinking about our relationships with our bodies, particularly in the context of the medical profession. I'm researching books bound in human skin because of a gut feeling that their murky histories had a lot to tell us about the price of a distance clinical gaze, but so little was known about these macabre objects. The only mentions of them in the academic literature are old and filled with more rumor and innuendo than confirmed fact. These accounts were laughably worse. For example, if you Google image search, anthropodermic bibliophagy, you get a few real examples, but mostly it's just a mix of odd looking old books and the kind of obvious fake that attacks a dermis regarding a stuffed book will call it a gaffe. Some are clearly movie props or replicas, but others report to be real, even when they have, say, the shadow of an actual face on the cover. And many of these creepypasta images are included in online articles about the practice as if they were genuine. So creepypastas are horror stories or images shared widely around the internet, usually with no attributable author basis in fact so works in the genre play with the line between reality and fiction akin to online urban legends. Rare books librarians have long known that each old book is like a mystery quietly awaiting its detective, the choirs, the chain lines and watermarks in the paper, the medieval sheet music hidden under bindings. In my each step of the books creation there are artisans whose names are forever lost to time. I've come to understand why terms such as bibliomania were coined when a detective is intrigued by particularly nuanced case obsession lurks just around the corner. As I hunt down the stories that attach themselves over time to these most mysterious of books. I see them less as objects and more as vessels for stories. The stories contained within the pages of course, but also the stories of the people whose skin may bind the covers. We spent more than five years traveling to see these books for myself. Along the way I have discovered that they provide extraordinary insight into the medical profession's complicated relationship with its past. I've also talked with colleagues to discern what these controversial objects mean for libraries today and what lessons about life and death they can hold for all of us. This mission has taken me into some of the world's most venerable cultural institutions and smallest community museums. I've met collection custodians who are incredibly excited to have these most unusual books with their dark pedigrees accessible on their shelves. I've met others desperate to bury them sometimes figuratively sometimes literally in the ground. I've uncovered some fascinating historical characters, bookbinders and those they bound, and they've illuminated how those in power viewed disenfranchised people's bodies with blithe banality. Anthropodermic books demand that we wrestle with mortality and what happens when immortality is thrust upon us, and they've clarified my own moral vision as a librarian and caretaker of what remains of the past. So now I'd like to welcome back Ginny Steele and we can get going with that Q&A. Great, thank you so much Megan. Fascinating to hear about and we've got a number of questions already so I think very stimulating conversation. So the first question is whether the samples were tested against chimpanzee skin. So the that's a great question. I get more detailed about the testing later in the book, but so each so in general, testing the proteins are not as exacting as testing DNA but it also gets rid of a lot of the interference that makes it more difficult to see if handling if handling something would contaminate something so they have depending on the evolutionary time that separates different animals within a family. So you get down to so the Bovedé family has cattle and sheep and goat and you can actually discern between all of those because they separated way further up the evolutionary tree. Great Ape family, the Homidae family is the separation is way closer in time. So we can't really tell the difference at this point using PMF between a gorilla bound book and a human skin bound book. I have yet to come across an alleged like gorilla or chimpanzee bound book it would be very interesting to see if we see any difference on that if we did, but usually it's the combination of the provenance, the claim that was bound in human skin and some sort of story, and then the positive test of a great ape that we put together to say that's this bound in human skin. Thank you. Just a quick librarians question for you. So if if a book is bound in human skin, is that put into the catalog record depends on the institution. The way that so when we know that these, these items are truly controversial, not like controversial in the way that said that people say that evolution is controversial but it's not really, you know, like this is actually how a lot of people have very legitimate differing reasons about what should be done, and how, how institutions should treat these objects. And I really give a lot of space in the book to having differing opinions about about that. So, certain institutions are like, you know, happy, they get the test result they're happy to include that in the catalog so everyone knows. Okay, this was previously thought to be bound in human skin but because of this test at this time we found out that it wasn't actually the sheepskin, or that it's, you know, confirmed human skin binding using this test, and then others are less forthcoming, because they don't they are afraid of the sort of public relations aspect of it. So it really depends on the institution. So what we do is, we had to come to this over time like decide what made sense and because we're interdisciplinary team we actually have pretty differing ideas about how we should handle the data. So we kind of ended up cleaning up a lot of it later and going and getting data sharing forms from all the teams to say we agree to share this much this part this thing. But we do that data sharing form after they get the results so they can make their, their decision with a full idea in mind. So we do the test it's like okay, your test was negative, are you okay with us sharing the story of your negative result or not. That's what we do so there are a few books that we've tested that they did not agree for us to share publicly what the results are so they are included in the anonymous count but not. I don't share like where the book title or where it is or what the result is. That's pretty rare usually these institutions are happy to share but whether they reflected on their own catalog or not. It, it seems to vary. And am I right in assuming that they're always in special collections. Yes, definitely. I have not I have not gotten any, any circulating ones, although the brown, the case of Brown University is very interesting. Although the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Museum which I spent a lot of time talking about in my book, although they have the largest confirmed collection of human skin books. Brown is only one behind them and they had five alleged ones and one was fake, and they have the very varied, interesting sort of titles and books and stuff. And I was told that they knew they had two or three, and then they found some on the cataloging like backlog cart. They found two more, and then they were like cataloging and it said like found in human skin they're like, uh, you know, it's the sort of surprise that they've been sitting around someone was getting to their backlog and had a little surprise there. So another question from Kathy dining here hi Kathy. Why would the relation book from 1660 76 be bound in human skin it doesn't seem like a natural or rational choice. I agree. I, and, and so there's little red flags that get thrown up sometimes we're like why would that be the one at Berkeley was maybe a little bit more understandable because it was it was a prayer book. It was, you know, the note inside to something like that they, you know, that clergy people were being killed and their books were being bound in their own skin and these kind of really salacious claims and I actually encountered that book. When I was doing a California real book school class. I had mentioned that I heard of human skin books, and then the next day the professor, you know, he laid out all these books, and for the students to work with and I picked it up and I was looking at him and I was like oh hey there's a human skin book and I'm like, Oh, I know this is my head I just didn't. I, that was the first time I'd ever held a human skin book at or allegedly human skin and I had no idea, and the story behind it was so salacious and kind of profane in this really big this book. I don't really understand. Yeah, except that maybe because if it was allegedly bound in 1770 or 1780s 90s whatever if it was allegedly bound the French Revolution, this could be the oldest book that somebody had. So sometimes people would take their most like prized old book and do that. But I agree that it didn't really make sense. And then lo and behold turns out it's not real. Yeah, and so it's interesting though to think about I don't know much else about the the previous owner who is the UC Berkeley professor but you could see why someone who is a historian and writes about the French Revolution and history of reading might be attracted to a very unusual object with this kind of idea behind it and then turns out not so much. Right, right. So, a question from Jim Shirashi. Is this, does this technique just exist because somebody thought it would be cool to test these books or was there some reason. So this test has been it's like a very well established long held easy like basic science test that's been around for a long time. But it was the interesting idea was when people like Daniel Kirby started using this chemist this chemistry test as a proteomic test to identify identify museum objects and works of art for preservation purposes so that it was the application of the test that was more interesting. So for instance, at Harvard's Peabody Museum, he was able to do things like find out that you, I am not sure how to say you pick the Native American group that there, they had one of their sort of kayaks, and they were able to take a sample and find out that although some of the records have been lost by tribes over time about what animals were like they believed it was one animal and it turned out it was like this earless sea line it was a different animal. So then the tribe actually was able to get more information about their own history because they were able to sort of retroactively find out what their ancestors used for the sinews and the leather and the whatever. And so that kind of work was what interested Daniel because he had worked at IBM as a chemist for 30 years, but you know you would do a test result and as he would put it you just throw it over the wall never hear again about what happened. And so we started using these test results for heritage science basically and conservation, you know, is, if I'm conserving a painting. Is this a, is this tempera paint made from a duck or a chicken, you know, that kind of thing can be really helpful to know to do the best work you can on, you know conserving and preserving an object. So he was doing that kind of work that then that he was doing for the preservation lab at Harvard that they were like hey what about the is, and you know the test they had been testing them testing book bindings already. People say why don't you do DNA tests on the on the books is because DNA tends to degrade really quickly after death, but especially the more things you do to it so these are ancient books that are, you know, 150 200 years old. But then they also go through this like very chemically altering process of leather. So there's usually no discernible DNA to be able to test within these books. And sometimes when you try to test alleged human skin objects, using like using DNA that can get false positives for things because of handling and stuff like that so it's, you know, if you misconstrued a Morocco leather from the calf that's not that big of a deal but if you misconstru a human object for an animal it's a lot bigger of a deal than a higher bar. So the part of the appeal of the PMF test. And you know these ancient DNA results are like methods are changing all the time so it could be that you know two years from now there's something that blows us out of the water. But it was part of the appeal is its cheapness and easiness and that it's very exacting in a certain way and you don't get like any sort of false positives or anything like that. Thanks. So, another question from Kathy, since your intro ties the, these books so closely to physician collectors, it would seem as though these collectors focused on their discipline. Were there subjects that are different with other titles. Those are great questions. I'm very pleased with the quality here. You all are hitting on some great topics. The. Yes, there are some there are really kind of a few total outlier books that don't make any sense. There are some discernible sort of schools so there's the anatomy book kind of skin book. There's the philosophical kind of, you know meditation on the soul, or that kind of idea. And then, so, although we haven't tested these so I have to give that caveat, there is a whole class of alleged human skin books in, in England and Scotland, where they were punitive that they were a murderer who stood trial, and then they took their and did all, you know, phrenological things, death masks, public dissection, articulating the skeleton, taking a trial transcript of his crimes and binding a skin in it. So yeah, so those are like really, I mean the provenance there when you're looking at some of these objects, especially when they're all together, make you think, this is probably real. But you know, I haven't actually gotten to test those books yet but yeah there is a pretty wide variety and sometimes it yeah sometimes there's literature. One of the most interesting ones that we've tested privately, which also has California connections is Edgar Allen put pose the gold bug. So yeah, it really does run the gamut. Yeah, fascinating. So it's possible to identify the, the, the kind of individual the skin comes from sort of the subspecies. Once you determine it's human skin. No. So, with the PMF testing, we cannot tell, for example, the biological sex right. Also, in terms of, of race, you cannot tell at all from that or you couldn't tell it from DNA really either the DNA testing for those sort of, you know, 23 me kind of like DNA tests. So let me tell you where a piece where the piece that they analyzed where they can detect somewhere down the line that there was someone in your lineage who had come from a certain area. But whether that person or you would then present in the world as a certain race, because race is actually totally, you know, socially constructed is you can literally not tell that from DNA. So it's a very common thought and so, and I do talk about I have one chapter that talks about some of some of the racial like elements of play I have a lot. Another chapter that also talks about women's bodies because some of them are met are specifically called out like found in the skin of a woman. Right, so I do talk about that in the book as well but the racial ones, thus far the ones that we've tested the ones that have called out the race of a person have all been fake. And it's like, why would you fake that and what is it about adding a racial characteristic that would make a forger, then, you know, add that to gain credibility in some way. And it's just a tricky topic but the skin itself. It, anybody's skin when tanned can be any color at all. And you literally cannot tell anything about the look of it to be able to discern any sort of background or anything like that so you really want to rely on provenance. I'm not sure if something else comes up, but it's, it's really, yeah, tying the books to historical provenance to try to get that information. So what laws, if any exist around the modern production and ownership of these books. So, another big, big, big question, and that is unsatisfyingly it depends. But it depends on the country depends on where you are depends on the country you're in laws in the UK in England but also more specifically Scotland have stricter laws and more specific law national laws around human remains what is a human remain. What can you do with it, and they get really detailed to it's like blood is a human remain fingernails are not a human remain you know like really, you know they really go for it in terms of giving some sort of guidance, and how old the human remain is and what you can do with it, whether at what point a human remain changes from being a body and be considered a an artifact through application of skill. You know, I mean they really get specific and France is incredibly strict around human remains of any kind, I mean surrogacy is illegal in France like they have really strict body rules and like laws national laws. Yes, the only national law that governs a dead body is NAGPRA, which has to do with Native American grave repatriation act. If, and as far as I know none of these books are allegedly a Native American has never come up at all. So, it really comes down to state law and the state laws, the relevant state laws have to do with what what you would consider desecration of a corpse. And it turns out is kind of in the eye of the beholder, because throughout history, their cremation would have been considered desecration of a corpse. And newer, you know, green disposition methods for bodies would have someone could take that. And it's like complaint based like I think that this person desecrated this corpse and that goes to court and then a law is kind of built upon that but it's not. So, my, I'm part of an organization called the Order of the Good Death, which is nonprofit that death positive nonprofit where we're trying to open up options for people especially options and information around death and dying and give people more like a wider of options around death. And so part of what we've done is that our legal teams have like gotten certain new disposition methods legalized in certain states so like in California now you can get aqua mated, which is like cremation but they use high powered water to kind of fire, and it's more ecologically sound because you're not doing the co2 thing, you know, those kind of things you, if you want to do it the right way you have to like actively try to get a law passed to make sure that it's okay to do to a human. You can do pretty much anything the animals though. So there's like almost no rules around that but but human remains so much higher bar. But I don't think that there's a huge market for people right now who are wanting to consensually, you know, find a book in their skin. However, there is a market and I talk about it a lot in my book for people to preserve tattoos post mortem. So that is the sort of cutting edge of where that's going, and there are outfits that are offering these services for preserving tattoos as artwork, like on, you know, preserve skin. And so a lot of us in the, you know, death positive community are just kind of waiting to see what happens if anybody ever, you know, says, you shouldn't be able to do that. The people who are doing it are doing it in absence of anyone saying no, but they are taking a risk that they could, you know, come up, run afoul of the law. So it's really a lot more nebulous than you might expect. So you sort of answered this next question, which is about whether all of these human skin books are from this the 16th 17th century, or are there more recent examples 20th century 21st century so obviously tattoos but doesn't sound as though there are a lot of other examples. I would say most are from the 19th century. The book, the book dates are misleading because it's like an old text that was bound in the 19th century and a newer binding, usually the latest evidence I could find of. This was great because I had never seen it anywhere before this was a real archive dive where I actually found something that I feel like is totally new, where I found an invoice from this book collector who was creating these, you know, creating books with a very well known London fine book binder. And it says like it lists the names of the books that he gave gave is a binding using leather supplied. So just running, but you know, I, I know where those books are, we tested them and they're real. And then I was able to find the invoice that points to he did, he had these bound in 1934, which is by far the latest I had like ever seen. So that was very interesting to me to be able to find something that recent but yeah going, going past that. Now you never know on a private market you never know, you know, you like this invoice was so important to me because it shows that you could get away with saying like using leather supplied and euphemism your way out of being detected about doing something. But it really is in the 50s. After World War two, that this idea of your bodily consent becomes so much more like actually codified into international law becomes like very important. So I feel like a stigma around doing something like that would be way worse than it would have been previously because it wasn't like technically illegal sort of how I mentioned before. And then it was more like this would really be against a doctor's code of ethics to do something like this like specifically to to use somebody's to do something to someone's body whether it's a experiment or whatever without their express consent. Right. So were there any books that came out of Nazi Germany. So this is most people's first reaction when they hear about books about the human skin they think oh Nazis did that. This is a very common, you know, thing to think, but it's, and there's really good reasons for us to associate that so I have a whole chapter in the book where I kind of freaked out why we have these associations and like where they all come from. But, you know, as of the beginning of the book there was no even alleged human skin book from that era that that anyone had ever seen or heard of that I got wind up or read about or anything like that. There is, but yeah there's, that's a strong association we all have and I try to unpack what that's all about. And since then I've heard about a case that maybe like relevant from that time period. It's, but they're, you know I send it to my chemists, and they have some pretty big questions about like the methodology and they're not really sure and the people who have a haven't been very forthcoming with further information. I'm going to need a little longer on that to like find out, but was it a systematic enough thing that you could say doctors at this time or, you know, you know people in a certain area or certain time period like did this that. No it wasn't at all. It was possible. Can I ever rule out that maybe one person did one. No, I can't do that, but it wasn't a systematic like known thing out of the Nazi era. It is fascinating all the facets of this you've looked into. So, could you say a little bit more about why those physicians started doing this and decided to use human skin. What was the availability or. Yeah, I think it was really, you know, of course I wish that I had, you know, some diary where a doctor was like, and then I did this because this reason I just don't have those the most I have ever is some little notes from a doctor who said I thought it was fitting to like to the Harvard book says like the doctor who got the skin and bound it is friends with the author who had lost his wife and wrote this really, you know, meditation on what happens to our soul when we die and that kind of thing. And he's this like telling his friend I thought it was fitting to bind, you know, to bind a book on this topic in the skin of, in the skin of a woman, and then you're like, question yourself like why would you think that's been, you know, like, why is that okay. It's just, yeah, I tried to. You hear about kind of gala's humor with, you know, physicians, I mean that's really well established people, medical students like sword fighting with body parts and doing that kind, you know, bringing skeletons to nurses nurses bring skeletons to dances and stuff like that. There's this sort of familiarity with the dead body that comes from through your medical training and this also kind of gala's humor sort of protective reaction against what could otherwise be a very like upsetting thing because you have to be at a certain level comfortable with it if you're going to do your job. So, but if you go too far into that gala's humor level or that sort of. Oh, well, you know, I dissect people every day and I'm like throwing organs in a bucket and so what's the big deal if I save this because, you know, I could even see this as some sort of like special thing like my book is more special now because I'm not a person. But they're not thinking of this is a person that I'm doing this to. And so it's like, where, how could that disconnect form and once I came across Michelle Foucault's clinical gaze I'm like, aha, I see, like, if you don't actively check in with your patients humanity, like, only in a situation like that, could you get so far removed from that. So it's more like, I guess my theory and a theme of the book that I believe that that is how it happened. And that's kind of this kind of in group out group thing where doctors talked amongst themselves and would show things and, you know, they had a different code of ethics and acceptability amongst themselves. Then they did with the public and the public didn't have any sort of means to either know about it or any recourse if something did happen if they did hear about something. They didn't really have any way to bring it up. That kind of stuff comes out a lot around the anatomy laws and so I do like about grave robbing in particular so I do draw a lot of parallels and give examples of that from other people's work about how the great the sourcing of bodies for anatomical learning and that sort of the fight and laws around that sort of parallel what I think was going on with the human skin books. Really fascinating. So I think we have time for one more quick question, which is how squeamish are the archivist librarians who have these books in their collection about handling them. And I would add to it and how did you feel at all squeamish yourself. So, I think it runs again it's a very, I think there's a personal kind of line that everyone has about when presented with it about what they think is gross or not gross and I think that it, the continuum to me I think has to do with squishiness, like a human bone is less disgusting than like, or an animal bone would be or articulated animal skeleton would be less disgusting or upsetting than a taxidermy then. And then when you get to wet specimens like it's kind of, I think there's like a real sort of continuum there. And then the freaked me out like the first time I heard about these books, I was just like my mind was blown I could not believe they existed and I'm looking around like doesn't it like it's okay with this. And then when I held one by accident that shocked me because I didn't know that I was holding one but turned out not to be real anyway. But, you know, over the years studying I've held, you know, over a dozen of them and they just, again they just feel like any other book if you're not really thinking about them that way. But the ones that that squick me out a little are the suede ones there I've held like two human suede books and for some reason, the suede versus regular leather I'm like you. I don't wear gloves. I only had to wear them once, but because rare buck people will know that you're more likely to damage a book wearing gloves, then you are to not wear them. So it's better not to wear gloves so you can feel if you're going to rip a page or something like that so. But yeah so whenever you see people holding them in pictures a lot of times are wearing gloves but it's more theater than practicality. So Megan, this has been fascinating. It's really wonderful and such a treat to hear you talk about all the work you've done. And it sounds as though you're going to continue looking for more of these and, and exploring this further so we'll, we'll have to look forward to hearing more. I do want to thank everybody who joined us this afternoon it's been great having you. I think this is an appropriate topic for Halloween month. I hope everybody will stay well stay healthy in this time of the pandemic, where your masks wash your hands practice physical distancing and and be safe we we are. We love our supporters and people who are members of our library family so thank you for being with us and we look forward to seeing you again next time. Take care everyone. Thanks Megan.