Early writing instruments made of bone or bronze marked moist clay tablets. Reed brushes were used to write on scrolls of papyrus, and the Romans used metal styluses to press Latin letters onto sheets of wax supported by tablets of beech or fir. Around 600 AD, the quill pen was invented in Seville. Long wing feathers of swans, turkeys, geese, crows, owls, hawks, and eagles were plucked, cleaned, sharpened, and dipped in ink, filling the hollow shaft or reservoir of the feather. Not until the eighteenth century was a machine-made steel pen point mass-produced.
The first inks were made from wood smoke and oil thickened with gelatin from asses’ skins and musk. Sulfate and gallnuts produced iron-gall ink, tannic acid and iron salts, bound by resin, another. Tar, carbon, oil, honey, gum, the stuff of early script. Brown-black dye from cuttlefish too, and purple ink from squid, scarlet from madder, and from scale insects named Kermes vermilio and cochineal. Indigo ink was made from a mixture of woad, indigo, and gallnuts; books were bound with glue made from boiled rabbit skins, fish, horses. (Secret or “invisible” ink, made from lemon juice, milk, vinegar starch, urine, etc., is a subtributary of ink history, filled with tales of wartime espionage, prison breaks, covert love letters, and children’s mischief.) The Declaration of Independence was written on parchment or, as parchment is now called, to distinguish it from vellum, animal membrane. At the university where I teach, every classroom is required to have a copy of the Declaration of Independence, printed on faux animal membrane, tacked to its walls. The original Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, United States Constitution, and Articles of Confederation were all inscribed on the flayed, scraped, pumiced, and chalked skins of calves.
Ink from fish, grubs, plants, soot. Clay, stone, dried leaves, plants, silk, animal skins. Feathers engorged with ink. The yearning for permanence.
In our tenure on this planet, we have moved from organic to inorganic materials, from writing with earth’s substances to writing electronically, with light. Scudding upon iClouds, bathed in iLight, the evocation i underscoring our devotion not to the planet, but to our disembodied, immortal hoped-for Selves.
In my skin are the prayers and all the blessings made to Holy Church.
And have not calves, goats, kids, Coneys, hares and cats skin? As vellum, they may be well written on. To be sure, their parchment is worth more than your skin, which serves you less.
—Dialogue between two French monks, fifteenth century
(Ronald Reed, The Making and Nature of Parchment)
In reading about the distinctions between parchment and vellum, animal vs. vegetable vellum, I stumble upon a term unknown to me—anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books with human skin. My morbid self plunges on.
In 2007, a book entitled A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors Garnet a Jesuit and His Confederates, bound in the skin of Father Henry Garnet, a faint impression of his death mask on its cover, was sold by an anonymous collector to an anonymous buyer at auction for $11,000. While Father Garnet did not participate in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament and assassinate King James I (now celebrated on November 5 as Guy Fawkes Day), the Jesuit priest willingly heard the confessions of those who were involved. Guilty by implication, Garnet was drawn, quartered, and a portion of his skin used to bind the account of legal proceedings against him.
Housed among other medical oddities at Old Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh is a worn, unremarkable-looking pocket book. Brownish-black with a pebbled texture, it is embossed with faded gilt lettering: EXECUTED 28 JAN 1829 BURKE’S SKIN POCKETBOOK. The pocketbook, empty of pages, used for personal notes and money, is bound in the skin of notorious criminal William Burke, who, along with William Hare, his accomplice, murdered sixteen people, selling the corpses of their victims to Dr. Robert Knox to be used for dissections in his highly popular anatomy lessons. Burke was hanged for the murders, and his body was (ironically) dissected at Edinburgh Medical College, his skin used to bind this otherwise common-looking pocketbook.
The practice of binding books in human skin began at least in the sixteenth century and waned in the latter years of the Victorian age, the same era that memorialized loved ones with “jewelry” fashioned from the often abundant, shorn hair of the deceased. Books were bound in human skin for diverse reasons, including to memorialize, as a gift to loved ones, or to bind court testimonies against criminals in their own punished hides.
Human skin, tanned, looks indistinguishable from goat, cattle, and sheep but for variance in pore size, shape, and a peculiar waxy odor. The tanning process destroys DNA, making it difficult to differentiate between skins of human, goat, cow, and pig, but a new technique, Peptide Mass Fingerprinting, or PMF, has proven useful in determining whether a book claiming to be bound in human skin through inscription or questionable historical “evidence” is genuine. In 1935, a book was deposited in Harvard’s Houghton Library by book collector John B. Stetson Jr., and given to the library in 1954 by Stetson’s widow. In April 2014, this book, Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame (On the Destiny of the Soul), was determined through PMF to be bound in human skin. “The PMF from Des destinées de l’ame matched the human reference, and clearly eliminated other common parchment sources such as sheep, cattle, and goat,” Bill Lane, director of Harvard’s Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory and Daniel Kirby of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies reported to the Houghton Library blog.
Sometime in the 1880s, Houssaye had given his book, a meditation on the soul and life after death, to his friend Dr. Ludovic Bouland, an ardent bibliophile. Dr. Bouland bound Des destinées de l’ame using skin from the back of an unclaimed female mental patient who had died of a stroke. A note penned by the doctor, inserted within the pages of the book, reads, “This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully, you easily distinguish pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering. I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman.”
The female binding of Des destinées de l’ame, as reported by the Harvard Crimson, has a “greenish-gold hue as well as visible pores.”
In the late nineteenth century, a French countess, dying of tuberculosis, requested that a strip of skin from her shoulders be delivered, upon her death, to writer and astronomer Camille Flammarion, so that he might use her skin in the binding of his next book. Compliant, perhaps flattered, Flammarion bound his 1877 copy of Les Terres du Ciel, The Lands of the Sky, a description of the planets in our solar system, with the countess’s shoulder skin. Until 1925, the book was displayed in a library in Juvisy-sur-Orge, France.
A nineteenth-century English bookbinder of erotica used the breasts of deceased females, purchased from medical interns, to bind copies of Justine and Juliette by Donatien Alphonse François, better known as the Marquis de Sade, and in London’s Wellcome Library, a seventeenth-century book on virginity, Séverin Pineau’s De virginitatis notis, graviditate et partu, is currently on view, rebound in human hide and tanned with sumac by the same Dr. Ludovic Bouland.
This grisly legend persists: When Marie-Thérèse of Savoy-Carignan, Princess de Lamballe, an intimate of Marie Antoinette’s, was executed in 1792, her naked corpse was pulled through the streets and the skin from her thighs removed to be used for the binding of a book. In whose private collection stands this rumored book, neatly bound in the marmoreal pallor of the Princesse de Lamballe’s skin?
As Dr. Simon Chaplin, head of the Wellcome Library, says, “There may still be a number of books in libraries and private collections bound in human skin, not yet categorized or identified.”
Each of us is a two-footed manuscript, a work in progress. Briefly bound in our own skin, uncataloged, unshelved, we form some seven billion volumes of the world’s living library.
; Within us too are digested libraries, cellular bibliothèques made of every book we have ever read. Writers fold sentences into crevices of the body, scratched in delible, sympathetic ink.
We are characters wandering, largely unaware, inside an inconceivably grand body of narrative, its scope greater than that of any novel by Balzac, Hugo, Sand, Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy, the plot a biomorphic field, an akashic record of all that has occurred and will occur.
If I kiss you, will you taste of all the books you have read or only the last one? If we are writers and we kiss, will we taste one another’s unwritten, still dreamed, books?
It ever was, and is, and shall be,
ever-living Fire, in measures being
kindled and in measures going out.
—Heraclitus
(Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
THE EATING PAPERS; OR, PROUST’S PORRIDGE
Visiting a friend in Paris, I read her copy of Larry Dossey’s Healing beyond the Body: Medicine and the Infinite Reach of the Mind, and learn that eating words inscribed on paper is an old, traditional folk cure for sickness.
When he became seriously ill at a conference in Baja, Dossey asked his friend Dr. Frank Lawlis to write words on a piece of paper and smash the paper into a capsule size that he could swallow with a glass of water. This would be his only medicine. He began to recover in three days, and though his friend considered the experiment a failure, since Dossey’s symptoms lingered for weeks afterward, Dossey reasoned that had he not eaten his paper capsule, he might well have died.
As an elementary student at the Queen of Apostles Catholic school in Chicago, poet Jeanine Hathaway carefully wrote “aspirin” on the corner of a page from her notebook, tore it off, rolled it into a ball, and swallowed it. Faith worked. She felt instantly better, her sickness gone, as if she had taken a real aspirin minus the vinegar taste.
In France, Italy, Russia, and Germany, Bible verses, prayers, and spells were written down to be eaten as medicine—in Germany, these were called Esszettel or “eating papers.” To drink these papers with water was to be cured by the power of words. In Holstein, the following words would be written on paper and given to a person with fever to be swallowed with water: “Fever stay away. (The person’s name) is not at home.” Reports from the fifteenth century describe apples being written upon and eaten, three almonds inscribed with words, squares of gingerbread imprinted with magical spells, and small pieces of buttered bread etched with a quill dipped in ink, to be eaten on three consecutive Fridays at sunrise and sundown. An epileptic might be helped by a formula written on a piece of paper using a needle that had once sewn something for a dead person, the paper then being warmed over steam from heated milk and presented to the epileptic on a piece of buttered bread. Even sick animals received Esszettel treatments. Today, a Bayer aspirin, a cross stamped on its round, white surface, is perceived by patients to be more effective than a smooth-faced, unadorned aspirin. And what of the Eucharist, believed by the Catholics who ingest it to be the literal body, the flesh of Jesus, healing the disease of sin, making them whole? What of the physician’s scrawled medical prescription (RX being Latin for “recipe”), legible only to the pharmacist—does it have shamanistic power? Is faith a greater medicine than medicine?
In the 1920s, documents found in Eastern Mongolia described the Tibetan folk-medicine cure of eating pieces of paper with healing words printed on them. Approximately one inch by one inch in size, the papers had prayers or spells written in Tibetan, with separate instructions in Mongolian for dosage or use.
In Uganda in the 1990s, photographs of a Christian charismatic preacher and healer were dissolved in water and drunk by his followers. In the Catholic tradition, images of the Madonna could be dissolved and drunk with water, or swallowed as pills.
Bibliophagy is a rare disorder wherein the afflicted person compulsively eats books. Symptoms include feelings of relief upon eating books, and a reduction in anxiety brought about by the eating of books. Treatment consists of behavior therapy and medication. But if words can be eaten as magic formulae, Esszettel to treat sickness, cannot whole books be prescriptively dined upon and digested? If I eat a page of Proust a day, scissored up and stirred into warm milk, a kind of porridge, will Proust’s words, his brain and style, over time, become part of my own? Might I compound a Virginia Woolf topical ointment or swallow Shakespeare gelatin capsules before bed and again upon waking? Is there a Flaubert lozenge or troche? A smear of Chekhov for my buttered bread? Oh, dear Physician, will it add to the effectiveness of my long-term treatment, if I, poor ailing author, drink such august faces, snipped and floating, in water or wine?
May these words, eaten or drunk, cure all straying thoughts:
Mos gus yod na
Khyl so od tung.
Where there is veneration,
Even a dog’s tooth emits light.
—Tibetan proverb
(Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book)
Please Translate
Edwidge Danticat
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
We were asked to translate from Haitian Creole to English the following phone messages from Lina Philippe Guillaume to her husband, Jonas Guillaume, and father of five-year-old Jimmy Guillaume. We are professional translators certified by the city of Miami and state of Florida, license number CT09956 on file, if requested.
Message #1: Hi. Just calling to see how you two are doing. I’ll call later. All right? All right then.
Message #2: Hi. Wow. Please call me back.
Message #3: Jonas, I wish you could call me back. I’m waiting for him. I have work tomorrow. I picked up an extra Saturday shift. Mama’s going to watch Jimmy for me.
Message #4: Jonas, I just want to hear from you. I hope everything’s OK.
Message #5: Jonas, is everything all right?
Message #6: Jonas, where are you?
Message #7: Jonas, it’s almost midnight. Where are you?
Message #8: Jonas, I’m coming over there. That’s right, you have my car. (Muttering.) Why did I let that thief borrow my car? (Louder.) Jonas, I only let you borrow my car so Jimmy could be safe in a proper car. Your car wasn’t in the shop, was it? I can’t believe I was fooled by you again.
Message #9: OK, Jonas, I’m very worried now. I’m going to call someone to bring me over there.
Message #10: Goddamn it, Jonas. It shouldn’t take this long to get some ice cream. Where are you with my son? In the middle of the night.
Message #11: Jonas! Jonas! I want my child.
Message #12: Jonas. (Sobbing.) Jonas, please. Where have you taken my child?
Message #13: (Inaudible.)
Message #14: (Screaming.) JONAS!
Message #15: (Calmer.) Jonas, please bring my baby back. I promise, I won’t leave you. I’ll stay with you. We can go to Pastor David and get some counseling, for Jimmy’s sake. Please, Jonas, just please answer this phone.
Message #16: You’re not a policeman here, Jonas. You have to follow the law here. Just like everybody else.
Message #17: I wanted to avoid this, but this is your last chance before I call the police. You better call me, you illegal mother—. OK. Please, Jonas, please let me know my baby’s OK.
Message #18: Jonas, listen to me. I’ll take this as far as you want me to. If you think you have more balls than every other man in the world, I’ll show you you’re wrong.
Message #19: Jonas, I love you. I really do. Just please bring my baby back now.
Message #20: Jonas, is this about the car? I told you I paid for it myself. Marcus did not help me. You’re jealous for nothing, Jonas. He’s my boss, that’s all, my supervisor. Yes, he promoted me at the hotel, but that had nothing to do with me and him being together. I mean, we’re not together, Marcus and me. I’m not together with him. And I’m not together with you. Please just bring my b
aby back.
Message #21: Jonas, you were my first love. Ever since we were kids in Haiti. I have always loved you. I’m not going to stop loving you for someone I’ve just met. I would never demean you like that, Jonas. Please.
Message #22: My baby, Jonas. Please. (Muttering.) I should have never trusted that good-for-nothing.
Message #23: You’re still sour about Marcus buying me that car, uh, Jonas? You’re holding my child hostage over a man and a car. Then you know what, you’re no man at all. The police are coming now to your place. The real police of this country. And I’m coming with them.
Message #24: Jonas, everyone knows I’m the one who bought that car. Marcus just gave me a ride to the dealership. He helped me bargain down the price. I bought it all by myself.
Message #25: Jonas, I’m never going to let you do this to me again. I’m never going to let you take my child again and just turn off your phone and scare me like this. It’s the last time. I’m telling you. The last time.
Message #26: Jonas, this time I’m really going to call the police. You think I’m afraid to because I don’t have my papers. Are you hoping they’ll deport me so you can keep my son? Marcus is a better man than you, Jonas. He gave me that job even without my papers. Screw the papers, Jonas. Even if I get deported back to Haiti, I’m taking Jimmy with me. Screw everything, Jonas. Next time you hear from me, you’ll hear sirens too. I’m going to be in a police car and I’ll be on my way to your house.
Message #27: Don’t push me, Jonas. You know I can do it and I will. You better just bring me back my child. I’m going to call Marcus too. He’ll give me a ride to Fort Lauderdale and the police will get my baby from you. They’ll arrest you and deport you, but not before I give Marcus a big kiss right there in front of your ugly face.
Speaking Volumes Page 4