Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: Binding books with human skin is a common trope in fantasy fiction. But how is such a practice seen by the modern mages in a world where magic is tangibly real? As many topics concerning magic, there aren’t necessarily any easy answers. (Additionally I will mention that this is one of the few lore texts that were entirely written by someone else. Dolly in this case.)
So goes the question; how much do you care for from whence your leather comes from? Perhaps it might’ve fallen from the tip of the tongue of a proponent of animal rights, someone close and sarcastic, the bite of a cruel bark… but anybody familiar with leather must’ve heard one variation too many, once. The question, the inquisitive wondering if someone once did turn the tanning rack upon the hide of an authentic, regular human being.
The short answer? Yes, but it’s nowhere near as interesting as you’re probably thinking. Very few, if any of the occurrences of binding human skin to a book you can go find in any public museum in the world were bound by some cackling madman with curious tastes in anthropomorphic decor. You can reliably chalk most of it up to macabre medical curiosity or some forgotten cultural not-actually-commonly-practiced endeavor from an equally forgotten culture that one weird time. Efforts like the time that William Burke, that English graverobber fella, kinda infamous for his time, donated his skin post-mortem for his own autopsy journal. Or historical recollections were someone just stumbled upon such a book without any knowledge or clear understanding besides open fascination. ‘The truth is kinda really dull’ and all that.
What’s important for us, and thus you, reading this, isn’t whether it’s been done, it has, but what it has entailed for us. Thing is, perhaps obviously, a big ‘duh’ on us, there’ve been people who’ve dabbled in the magic arts, and gotten this exact idea. See, there was this theory, started back in like, the 1870s according to what little research’s been done, that SUPPOSEDLY, emphasis mine, that there was this totally legit druidic concept of binding the spiritual value of a being to a physical thing, like a collection of holy words. Now, scary thing is, this idea is probably legit, but that’s also probably why WE DON’T DO IT ANYMORE.
See, when you just bind some book willy-nilly, it doesn’t mean much less do anything. You skin a criminal and make him put together your journal with his bits, great, real swell. But when you do this with books of belief or magic, things that people feel very strongly for or believe in, like a religious text… for some reason that, well, we frankly just don’t understand, it gains life. The life of whoever, or whatever the hide belonged to. There are scant copies of phantasmic tomes that followed this practice that haven’t yet been destroyed, and the thing is… they’re some real powerful shit. It’s not that the book contains magic, the book itself IS magic, like how we transpose magic within ourselves to use it. The book itself, at least in theory… is a living conduit. Because the poor soul is the one handling all the magic for you. And we’ve no idea how, or what this means for them. Y’see, kids, there’s a reason your elders destroyed any semblance of this practice they’ve managed to find on the spot.
Maybe though we’ve kinda screwed the pooch on telling you that part, though – y’see, the way this magic works is through, fitting the book part, knowledge. Through knowing. Knowing what the book exactly is, and what it’s made from – or rather, more specifically who. Morbid as the book might be, s’still just a book if you don’t have a lick of magic to your name. And on some level, it’s better to let the world acknowledge the existence of this stuff, but only so far. What’s scary to us isn’t people knowing about this practice, it’s people learning about the seedy underbelly of it. Of what someone with as much as an inkling of magic could do. There’s no reason to be scared of some criminal-skin medical journal, but what’s really scary is this getting out there, like with Flammarion. Y’ever heard about him? Bushy-browed, bearded fella, pretty dour and big on astronomy. Also, a Magi! Anyway, put very simply, he had this admirer, we’re still not sure who she was…
…but far as we know, somehow she’d learned about this. And one day, he ends up in possession of a tome of his that’d been bound in human skin. Her skin. We don’t know why or how, the records are empty, but… somehow, this random woman we know literally nothing about knew exactly the kind of power this carries, and maybe out of some weird idea of love, official reports call her a ‘distant admirer,’ did this for the old coot. And it’s still right there, in his old observatory. Proudly marked.
We’re lucky nobody knows who she was. We can only hope nobody tries to find out.
An excerpt from an exercise from the repertoire of Archchancellor Corbridge, of the Arkham Institute
Esoteric Musings... 