Dark Archives
A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin
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Narrated by:
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Justis Bolding
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By:
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Megan Rosenbloom
About this listen
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 worlds 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.
A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives - captivating and macabre in all the right ways - she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.
©2020 Megan Rosenbloom (P)2020 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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- By Dr. Small on 05-04-20
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ArtCurious
- Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History
- By: Jennifer Dasal
- Narrated by: Jennifer Dasal
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas, handbags, scarves, and dorm-room posters. But did you also know Monet and his cohort were trailblazing rebels whose works were originally deemed unbelievably ugly and vulgar? And while you probably know the tale of Vincent van Gogh's suicide, you may not be aware that there's pretty compelling evidence that the artist didn't die by his own hand but was accidentally killed - or even murdered.
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Couldn’t take it
- By Amira on 03-05-22
By: Jennifer Dasal
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Descartes' Bones
- A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason
- By: Russell Shorto
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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On a brutal winter's day in 1650 in Stockholm, Frenchman Rene Descartes, the most influential and controversial thinker of his time, was buried after a cold and lonely deathfar from home. Sixteen years later, the pious French Ambassador Hugues de Terlon secretly unearthed Descartes' bones and transported them to France. Why would this devoutly Catholic official care so much about the remains of a philosopher who washounded from country after country on charges of atheism?
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Philosophy of Modernity
- By Roger on 06-17-09
By: Russell Shorto
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Sacred Treasure - The Cairo Genizah
- The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic
- By: Rabbi Mark Glickman
- Narrated by: Rabbi Mark Glickman
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in an old Egyptian synagogue - the amazing story of one of the most important discoveries in modern religious scholarship. In 1897, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and there found the largest treasure trove of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered.
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Not what I thought it would be, but worth it
- By Lisa on 03-14-12
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The Art of the English Murder
- From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock
- By: Lucy Worsley
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early 19th century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria's lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism.
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Should Come With a Spoiler Alert
- By Jessica on 04-15-16
By: Lucy Worsley
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Gods of the Upper Air
- How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
- By: Charles King
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced". What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature.
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Great Book, Much Needed despite poor performance
- By J. Kahn on 08-21-19
By: Charles King
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The Butchering Art
- Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
- By: Lindsey Fitzharris
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.
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Not one boring moment!
- By WRWF on 12-22-17
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Ripper
- The Secret Life of Walter Sickert
- By: Patricia Cornwell
- Narrated by: Mary Stuart Masterson
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art - as well as extensive evidence - points to another name, one that's left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival material - including a rare mortuary photo, personal correspondence and a will with a mysterious autopsy clause - and applied cutting-edge forensic science to open an old crime to new scrutiny.
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I thought this was a new book.
- By Stephanie on 03-01-17
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The Hunt for History
- On the Trail of the World's Lost Treasures - from the Letters of Lincoln, Churchill, and Einstein to the Secret Recordings On-Board JFK's Air Force One
- By: Nathan Raab, Luke Barr
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Nathan Raab, America’s preeminent rare documents dealer, delivers a “diverting account of treasure hunting in the fast lane” (The Wall Street Journal) that recounts his years as the Sherlock Holmes of historical artifacts, questing after precious finds and determining their authenticity.
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I wished it was longer
- By NANAS on 04-15-20
By: Nathan Raab, and others
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The Organ Thieves
- The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South
- By: Chip Jones
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a Black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a White businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.
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Not your story to tell
- By Bianca S on 11-22-20
By: Chip Jones
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History's Most Powerful Witches and Wizards
- 2 Books in 1
- By: Desmond Wilde
- Narrated by: Charles D. Baker
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Witches have always worried, scared, and fascinated people in equal measure. From dark magic to home remedies, they have been part of the cultural landscape for people across the world. From Europe to the Americas, Asia to Africa, the idea of women who delve deep into magic has created some of the most enduring stories in the history of humanity. Often, these stories blend the real with the unreal, truth with fiction, and magick with the mundane.
By: Desmond Wilde
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The Apparitionists
- A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
- By: Peter Manseau
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.
By: Peter Manseau
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
- The History and Future of Reading
- By: Leah Price
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed.
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Wasn't a fan.
- By Erika on 12-27-20
By: Leah Price
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Ruined it at the end
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Enjoyable author, but not my style
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Boys Enter the House
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As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978-79, he became known as one of many so-called “sex murderers” who had begun gaining notoriety in the random brutality of the 1970s.
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When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of 128 children who are research subjects in an unprecedented 30-year psychological experiment that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in an abusive marriage to a man with a violent history and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped the person she became and her life choices. Is she the narrator of the story of her life, or is something else?
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There should be a law. Oh wait there is.
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Pathogenesis
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Devolves into political advocacy
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Ruined it at the end
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Enjoyable author, but not my style
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As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978-79, he became known as one of many so-called “sex murderers” who had begun gaining notoriety in the random brutality of the 1970s.
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What we really needed to know about the Gacy murders.
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By: David Nelson
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Data Baby
- My Life in a Psychological Experiment
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When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of 128 children who are research subjects in an unprecedented 30-year psychological experiment that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in an abusive marriage to a man with a violent history and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped the person she became and her life choices. Is she the narrator of the story of her life, or is something else?
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There should be a law. Oh wait there is.
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Devolves into political advocacy
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Without a Prayer
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Teenager Lucas Leonard made shocking admissions in front of the altar - he'd practiced witchcraft, conspired to murder his parents, and committed unspeakable crimes. The confessions earned him a brutal beating by a gang of angry church members, including his parents and sister. Lucas was brought to the hospital dead, awakening the sleepy community of Chadwicks, New York, to the horror that had been lurking next door. Nine members of Lucas' church would eventually find themselves facing murder-related charges. But how did they get to that point? And what made Lucas confess?
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The Depravity of the Human Soul
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Out Cold
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In Out Cold, science writer Phil Jaekl chronicles the underappreciated story of human innovation with cold, from Ancient Egypt, where it was used to treat skin irritations, to 18th-century London, where scientists used it in their first explorations of suspended animation. Throughout history, physicians have used cold to innovate life extension, enable distant space missions, and explore consciousness.
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Well Rounded
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Ghostland
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Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes", Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places.
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A fluffed-up college essay writ large.
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The Great Mortality
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The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholars and the general public. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story. In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people—one third of the known population—before it vanished.
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Endless Speculation and Contradiction
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The Trauma Cleaner
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Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife... but as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less. A man who bled quietly to death in his living room. Sarah Krasnostein has watched the extraordinary Sandra Pankhurst bring order and care to these, the living and the dead - and the book she has written is equally extraordinary.
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Beautiful, emotional, and perfectly narrated.
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The Unclaimed
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In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the twisting, poignant paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers, and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will.
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Fantastic
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Over My Dead Body
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The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead. Melville’s Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but have also shaped it.
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excellent read!
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All the Living and the Dead
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Story
Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear.
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Excellent
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From Here to Eternity
- Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
- By: Caitlin Doughty
- Narrated by: Caitlin Doughty
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body. Grandpa's mummy has lived in the family home for two years, where the family has maintained a warm and respectful relationship. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls) and introduces us to a Japanese kotsuage.
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Caitlin has done it again
- By Shaun on 10-03-17
By: Caitlin Doughty
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Gory Details
- By: Erika Engelhaupt
- Narrated by: Mari Weiss
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Filled to the brim with far-out facts, this wickedly informative narrative from the author of National Geographic's popular Gory Details blog takes us on a fascinating journey through an astonishing new reality. Blending humor and journalism in the tradition of Mary Roach, acclaimed science reporter Erika Engelhaupt investigates the gross, strange, and morbid absurdities of our bodies and our universe.
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Feels like old school Discovery channel
- By Anonymous User on 02-15-23
By: Erika Engelhaupt
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Tremors in the Blood
- Murder, Obsession, and the Birth of the Lie Detector
- By: Amit Katwala
- Narrated by: Paul Bellantoni
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
As new forms of lie detection gain momentum in the present day, Tremors in the Blood reveals the incredible truth behind the creation of the polygraph, through gripping true-crime cases featuring explosive gunfights, shocking twists, and high-stakes courtroom drama. Touching on psychology, technology, and the science of the truth, Tremors in the Blood is a vibrant, atmospheric thriller and a warning from history: beware what you believe.
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Incredible Book
- By Christine on 01-04-24
By: Amit Katwala
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Strange Medicine
- A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages
- By: Nathan Belofsky
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 5 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Now published in five languages, Strange Medicine casts a gimlet eye on the practice of medicine through the ages that highlights the most dubious ideas, bizarre treatments, and biggest blunders. From bad science and oafish behavior to stomach-turning procedures that hurt more than helped, Strange Medicine presents strange but true facts and an honor roll of doctors, scientists, and dreamers who inadvertently turned the clock of medicine backward.
By: Nathan Belofsky
What listeners say about Dark Archives
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- Jessica Jackson
- 02-24-23
Wonderfully researched and read perfectly
I know I would’ve loved the extensive research on a very sensitive topic but the book was enhanced by the reading as the author dealt with people from different countries and cultures, both living and dead.
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- Abbey Pflegl
- 11-21-21
Fascinating
What most would consider a macabre subject, I truly enjoyed the journey with the author through finding out more about these interesting and dark books.
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- Paula
- 05-24-21
An intelligent and empathetic look at both books and death
Despite the sensationalism of the title, this book is extraordinarily well researched, and is written very thoughtfully and empathetically. It is a book that immediately piqued my interest, since I not only am drawn to macabre subjects, but I also work in the library field. It touches on issues of censorship, research ethics, conservatism, dehumanization, consent, and death positivity. As long as you’re not super squeamish, I would recommend this book to any adult.
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- Melanie-mae Lavoie
- 01-25-23
accents
narrator is good until they start doing accents to match the quotes. otherwise fine.
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- Catherine McMahon
- 07-14-21
Slow read
I found this book pretty boring. I felt like the topic could have been covered in one chapter.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-05-21
Armchair Psychology with Nothing Gained
The narrator, Justis, has an amazing voice! Her cadence was soothing but kept the story feeling personal. She made it feel like a conversation between friends.
Except, I am not a very good friend of this book...
Maybe if I didn't have a heavy interest in morbid history this book would've been more insightful. Unfortunately, all I really learned is that the French don't like sharing. There wasn't a real deep insight or introspection behind the idea of why human skin books create such interest and controversy. The deep religious, cultural and emotional undertones of how the human body is used after death was only brushed against--outside of one incredibly pompous interview with a fellow librarian (the one who likened skin books to sexual assault). As for the practice itself... I learned the proper names for bookbinding, so there's that.
All in all, I don't regret the read but I won't recommend it.
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