Time: 7 pm Eastern time
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On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand?
In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world’s most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, innocents, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship.
Tonight, join authors and Order of the Good Death members Colin Dickey (The Unidentified, Ghostland) and Megan Rosenbloom (Dark Archives) in conversation, as they discuss researching the weirdest of the weird, and the states of publishing and death positivity in the time of COVID-19.
Megan Rosenbloom is Collection Strategies Librarian at UCLA Library in Los Angeles. Megan served as a medical librarian for many years, where she developed a keen interest in the history of medicine and rare books. She is President of the Southern California Society for the History of Medicine and a proponent of the Death Positive movement. She leads a research team called The Anthropodermic Book Project that aims to find the historic and scientific truths behind the world’s alleged books bound in human skin, or anthropodermic bibliopegy, and her debut book about this practice, titled Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, published October 20, 2020 with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Colin Dickey is a writer, speaker, and academic, and has made a career out of collecting unusual objects and hidden histories all over the country. His books include The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith, and Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. He's a regular contributor to the LA Review of Books and Lapham's Quarterly, and is the co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. He is also a member of the Order of the Good Death, a collective of artists, writers, and death industry professionals interested in improving the Western world's relationship with mortality. With a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California, he is an associate professor of creative writing at National University.