It's a family affair here at Book Lovers and this week we introduce the newest member of the team - Luke. Here are some bookish questions and answers by way of introduction.
This week we are bringing you a list of book recommendations to help stay spooky into November. The books on this list are specifically chosen as "secret horror novels". Books that tend not to be shelved in the Horror or Thriller sections of your favourite book shops but are terrifying nonetheless!
Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, 1916 - August 8, 1965) was an American horror and mystery author. Her first novel "The Road Through the Wall" (1948) was about her childhood in California and launched a career that saw her publish six novels and over 200 short stories!
Lovecraft wrote intense gothic horror and sparked the sub genre of Cosmicism, perfect for a Halloween evening. Dark tales of madness and the occult, magic and mysticism, astral projection, and sacrifice to ancient and otherworldly god-like beings named "The Great Old Ones". His most famous examples include "The Call of Cthulhu", "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow at Innsmouth".
With Halloween just around the corner BLG will be bringing you some spooky book related stories from around the web. To kick us off we bring you the tale of a grizzly discovery at Harvard University's Houghton Library in 2014.
Arsene Houssaye's Des destinies de l'ame is an example of anthropodermic binding - the practice of binding books in human skin. Quite fittingly it is a book about the soul and life after death!
Is it definitely human skin?
Scientists and researchers at Harvard University are pretty confident it is. The Director of Mass Spectronomy and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, Bill Lane said it is "very unlikely that the source could be other than human," and Senior Rare Book Conservator Alan Puglia stated a 99% certainty that the binding came from a human being.
Yes! Binding books in animal leather is common even to this day, but there are many examples as recently as the 19th century of using human skin for bookbinding.
It was completed in the mid 1880's and has been in Harvard's collection for more than 80 years. Houssaye gifted the manuscript to his friend Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor and renowned Book Lover. Later it was donated to the Harvard collection by a John B. Stetson, Jr. in 1934 where it became a book of legend to students and bibliophiles alike.
It's a fascinating glimpse into a practice that was once commonplace but makes our modern skin crawl. I think I prefer the wrapping paper and sticky tape method I used on textbooks when I was at school. This is one book we will definitely judge by its cover!
We will be back with more gruesome tales in the lead up to Halloween so stay tuned, but for now I'm off to have some books from my bookshelf tested just in case!