"Sometimes the skins of other animals were employed for the formation of manuscripts. Thus, the library at Dresden contains
a Mexican calendar traced on human skin; and that of Vienna presents another [manuscript] from the same country, full of figures designed and coloured on the same material."

—An Introduction to the Study of Bibliography by Thomas Hartwell Horne, 1814, London.

Thomas Hartwell Horne was born in 1780 in London. He published the work from which the above quotation was selected when he was around 34. Less than fifty years later he was dead, his skin likely interred with the rest of him in some modest grave, and spared the interesting fate described above.

Thinking of skin as substrate is nothing new. Tattooing has been an important part of many cultures (and subcultures) for a very, very long time. I like the idea of person as document, a moving thing living in the present, with a carefully executed narrative of the past winding down his body, hidden under clothes, or not.

Accounts of books bound in human skin will occasionally linger with some enjoyment on startling descriptions of those things present which link the material to its former inhabitant. Tattoos are sometimes mentioned here. Especially with those legendary accounts of criminals whose trial proceedings are bound in their own skin, our minds lead us easily to visions of the crude markings in faded black; marks of a life spent, perhaps, aboard ships rocking at sea or docked at rough ports; now flat, the skin surrounding them turned unnaturally dark and flaking, glued to boards.

Gruesome does leather become when tied to a life, especially a life endowed with the consciousness that we describe first when distancing ourselves from beasts. But like shrunken heads in glass cases, we visit these ideas with a mixture of revulsion, fascination, and something akin to religious reverence. A body part, even removed by violence and centuries from its "soul", is as magical a thing as we could ever hope to encounter. So far removed from the person, and yet they are the person embodied, and our minds flash to the unrealities of the past.

Legends and artifacts echo this visceral idea. The ancient ceramic, the tale of the fall of Troy. We inhabit the ghosts of our past through these stirrings in the fabric of the present, though in reality they are but dead things, devoid of any practical function. We are curious in this way. The intangible connections summoned through examination and contemplation of artifacts and stories is a significant element in all cultures. In some this is manifested in a compulsion to preserve things from the past, but not in everyone, nor in the same people at all times, or in the same ways -- witness the burning of ancient Egyptian mummies in European fireplaces. Affluent homes, inhabited by collectors of fine, ancient things. Save the sarcophagus, burn the corpse.

But even in the act of destroying relics from the past, there is something meaningful, even to the destroyer. Certainly mummies were more difficult to procure than firewood. Their presence in the home -- their smoke in the chimneys -- attests to the novelty of the practice. Possessing a body, a dry shell, emptied of soul, and through one's own actions allowing the flames to unmake in moments what careful preparation preserved for millennia.

A dead, dried body part, devoid of water. A mass of carbon-based matter.

A record of a life.

A description of a life never rarely encapsulates the essence of the person. A biography could very easily mark all of the momentous achievements in a person's life, and the historical context. Dates and places, names and actions. But a thousand pages later, one would likely be unaware of the person's annoying tendency to breathe loud in confined spaces. His bad breath. Her ability to carry on two conversations at once at a dinner party, and later to talk very softly to the man she brought home for the night about love and life in a such a beautiful way that the man never once looked at his watch. His tendency to shuffle when he walked.

The artifacts and stories of a culture, the manuscripts, the pieces of bodies, that for whatever reason are preserved, tell the same stories. Incomplete, ecstatic, ephemeral.