This is fun: as of last May, at least 18 books in public institutions were found to be bound in human skin

“The identification of human skin bindings has been attempted by examining the pattern of hair follicles, to distinguish human skin from that of other animals typically used for bookbinding, such as calf, sheep, goat, and pig. This is a necessarily subjective test, made harder by the distortions in the process of treating leather for binding. Testing a DNA sample is possible in principle, but DNA can be destroyed when skin is tanned, it degrades over time, and it can be contaminated by human reader.”

Get your library card today!