Police plea on macabre book find: "Police seek the owner of a 300-year-old ledger, bound in human skin, found in a street in Leeds."

Burglars don't like them, Harvard hopes to avoid them becoming "an object of fascination'", but anthropodermic bibliopegy, or the binding of books in human skin, was, historically, not that unusual. Not unusual,to be sure, but a wee bit kinky all the same. Doctors had books of anatomy bound in the skin of the poor (possibly burked) bastard they'd cut up to advance science. The trial records of particularly gruesome (or perhaps supple) murderers were bound in the skin of the executed felons, particularly in late-eighteenth century France.