"It’s easier to believe that objects of human skin are made by monsters like Nazis and serial killers, not the well-respected doctors the likes of whom parents want their children to become someday."

Says Megan Rosenbloom, author of "DARK ARCHIVES/A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin," quoted in "Yes, Books Were Bound in Human Skin. An Intrepid Librarian Finds the Proof" by James Hamblin (NYT).

In fact, anthropodermic bibliopegy was not the practice of some singularly heinous regime.... Human skin leather looks indistinguishable from that of other mammals, and only recent developments in DNA sequencing technology have made it possible to tell a skin-bound book from a forgery. The making and selling of such books was pursued at many times and in many places, including late-19th-century America. John Stockton Hough, a Philadelphia physician, is known to have bound three textbooks about reproduction in the skin of Mary Lynch, a local woman who died at 28 in 1869 of tuberculosis and a parasitic infection. During an autopsy, Hough removed and preserved skin from her thighs, and then bound his books with it — presumably as a form of homage....

Rosenbloom [details]... the techniques of tanning, soaking and scraping the “hides” to preserve them. At times her descriptions seem gratuitously to indulge the same morbid fascination that has long drawn people to these objects....

Cremated remains are manufactured into all sorts of keepsakes: paperweights, gazing balls, blown-glass "art," jewelry. Is that more acceptable because it's processed into glass and retains none of the feeling of a human body?

What if a dying person wanted her skin used to make a keepsake book? My hypothetical requires the future dead body to want to be used to make a book — what book would you want to be if you wanted to be a book? — and someone who wanted to receive such a book. Presumably, the cost would be high, so deduct that from your inheritance before you say, sure, I'd love a copy of "12 Rules for Life/An Antidote to Chaos" bound in the skin of my late father. 

There's a Wikipedia article "Anthropodermic bibliopegy." Excerpt:

Three books in the libraries of Harvard University have been reputed to be bound in human skin, but peptide mass fingerprinting has confirmed only one, Des destinées de l'ame by Arsène Houssaye, held in the Houghton Library. (The other two books at Harvard were determined to be bound in sheepskin, the first being Ovid's Metamorphoses held in the Countway Library, the second being a treatise on Spanish law, Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias Hispaniae, held in the library of Harvard Law School.) 

The Harvard skin book belonged to Dr Ludovic Bouland of Strasbourg (died 1932), who rebound a second, De integritatis & corruptionis virginum notis, now in the Wellcome Library in London. The Wellcome also owns a notebook labelled as bound in the skin of 'the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence', presumably Crispus Attucks, but the library doubts that it is actually human skin.

Here's an article from 2014, "Harvard scientists confirm Arsène Houssaye book is bound in human skin/Arsène Houssaye’s 'Des destinées de l’ame' is believed to have been bound in the skin of a female mental patient who died of a stroke" (Independent):

According to Heather Cole, Assistant Curator of Modern Books & Manuscripts a note detailing its origin inserted inside the book revealed the human skin used to bind the book was taken from the back of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke. 

The note, from Dr. Ludovic Bouland, states: “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman."

"Des destinées de l'ame" = Destinies of the soul.

If preserving human skin seems way out of line to you, consider all the people these days with elaborate, expensive, and even seriously artistic tattoos. Here's a BBC article from last year noting that there's an increasing number of requests to save the tattoos from a dead body:

"People put urns on their mantle and to me, my tattoos are more meaningful than an urn on the mantle," says [Kyle Sherwood of Save My Ink Forever]. "It's an actual piece of a person that symbolises something." 

"When my husband passed away, half of me passed away with him," [said the widow of a man named Chris Wenzel]. "I didn't know what to do. I just knew he wanted this preservation done. I had to set aside my own emotion to get this part done.".. Ms Wenzel chose the pieces to be preserved - two full sleeve tattoos including the top of Chris' hands, his throat and chest piece, his full back piece, two thigh pieces and calf piece.

Please let it be known that I selected this topic for blogging because I needed an escape from the grisly topic of the 2020 election.