Books Bound In Human Skin Are Spooky Reminder Of 'Macabre' Medieval Trend

Charles W. Eliot, cousin of the Nobel-prize winning poet T.S. Eliot and a former president of Harvard University, once described books as the "quietest and most constant of friends." That warm little expression becomes somewhat grisly when one considers that several books in Harvard's library were bound not with leather but with tanned, human flesh.