GRIM EXHIBITS

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 April 1937, Page 13

GRIM EXHIBITS

HUMAN SKIN FOR BOOKBINDING

Among the exhibits at the leather exhibtion at Charing Cross is. a piece of leather, measuring three inches by three, which is marked “human skin.” It is another specimen of that gruesome skill which was as ready to turn the human integument as the choicest lambskin into leather, says the “Manchester Guardian.” There used to be in the Athenaeum at Bury St. Edmunds a record of the trial in that town, in 1828, of William Corder for the murder of Maria Marten —the notorious crime: on which was founded “Maria Marten, or the Murder in the Red Barn,” for long years one of the most blood-curdling of the stock pieces of the minor theatres in town and country. The volume at Bury is bound in a material that looks like brown calf, but it contains this inscription: “The binding of this book is the skin of the murderer Wiliam Corder, taken from his body and tanned by myself in the year 1828 —George Creed, surgeon to Suffolk Hospital.” Rather a. grim “association” volume!

But Exeter Public Library can go one better —or rather worse. On March 25, 1830, George Cudmore, who had been sentenced to death for poisoning his wife, was executed there, and his skin was used for binding a certain book. The skin is of a dull ivory colour, and quite nice and soft to the touch. But it is rather a shock to anyone of literary tastes who handles the binding to find that it encloses a copy of Milton’s poems. Some years ago, Mr. Sanborn, a. patriotic American citizen, tjesired that. in death as in life his body should proclaim the glory of the republic. He left £lOOO to Professor Agassiz, tho eminent, naturalist, in return for which he was, by an extremely scientific process set forth in the will, to tan his —Sanborn’s —skin into leather and have a drum made of it. Two of the most suitable bones of the body were to be made into drumsticks, and with these Mr. Warren Simpson—to whom Sanborn left, the remainder of his property—was “on every seventeenth of July to repair to the foot of Bunker’s Hill and at sunrise beat, on the drum tho spirit-stirring strains of ‘Yankee Doodle.’ ”