Paul Needham is an American academic librarian. From 1998 to 2020, he worked at the Scheide Library at Princeton University. A Guggenheim Fellow and Bibliographical Society Gold Medallist, Needham has delivered the Sandars Readership in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge, the A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Lyell Lectures at the University of Oxford. His focus is on incunabula, the earliest printed books in Europe.
Scheide Library in 2013
Anthropodermic bibliopegy
Anthropodermic bibliopegy is the practice of binding books in human skin. As of April 2022, The Anthropodermic Book Project has examined 31 out of 50 books in public institutions supposed to have anthropodermic bindings, of which 18 have been confirmed as human and 13 have been demonstrated to be animal leather instead.
A book bound in the skin of the murderer William Burke, on display in Surgeons' Hall Museum in Edinburgh
A 17th-century book on female virginity at the Wellcome Library, rebound in human skin by Dr. Ludovic Bouland around 1865
Bound in 1863 by Josse Schavye, the same binder of the genuine anthropodermic Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica in Brown University, and who bound at least four books with human leather in his lifetime.
Panel with Latin inscription in the book: Hic liber femineo corio convestitus est ("This book has been bound with the skin of a woman")
