Book covered with human skin resurfaces at Bailey Library

SRU's Bailey Library is home to a variety of unique and rare items, which happens to include a once-missing crumbling book of Spanish erotic poetry from South America.What makes this book important isn't its subject, or the fact that it'd been missing for years until this past Winter Break, but its binding.

Human skin.

Nethkelum Perera, junior computer science major and technology assistant for the library, was one of the students who tried searching for the book. He said he learned about it from Rita McClelland, interlibrary loan librarian, who in turn learned about it years ago from another librarian who was recently retired at the time.

He became interested in searching for the book after it came up in a conversation with McClelland in the summer of 2008, Perera said.

"The book is bound in human skin," he said, "so it's kind of special. I wanted to see and touch it. And Slippery Rock is a small place, so I thought there has to be some history for the book to end up here in such a small library."

Perera said he and a co-worker-who has since graduated-went through sections of Special Collections to find the book, but failed because they didn't have necessary information such as the title or author. He said that Judy Silva, arts librarian and archivist, and another worker then perused the whole section but still couldn't find the book because they were looking at small boxes instead of larger ones.

Another hindrance was the fact that the author's name is different from what's in the library's system, Voyager-it lacks the hyphenated last name of Medina-Navascues that had been added to Voyager years ago.

Jessica Marshall, collection management librarian, was the one who found it.

"I did not remember that we had withdrawn the book previously," she said. "It just hit me that maybe it had been moved to the Folio section [in Special Collections], which is the section with large books that will not fit on the usual shelves. I checked the Ps in the Folio section and I found it. Because there are no climate controls in our Special Collections, the skin binding has become brittle, so it was put into a box to protect it."

The thin, light brown, peeling cover has "El largo viaje [The long journey, by] Tere Medina" printed in large black letters. Underneath the first layer of skin resembles bark and a filmy black substance. The pages are like brown paper, and printed on the first page is a Spanish and English explanation of the book.

"The cover of this book is made from the leather of the human skin," it reads. "The Aguadilla tribe of the Mayaguez Plateau region preserves the torso epidermal layer of deceased tribal members. While most of the leather is put to utilitarian use by the Aguadillas, some finds its way to commercial trade markets where there is a small but steady demand. This cover is representative of that demand."

Silva said she did research online to find others of its kind, but the library's edition appears to be the only one bound in human skin. And due to its deteriorating nature, she said, it was taken to Special Collections so it wouldn't be handled as often.

Before its transfer to Special Collections, Del Hamilton, who has since left Bailey Library to be a project manager of Library Associates Companies, had been one of the first to take interest in the book.

"I started at Slippery Rock in 1990 as the Instructional Materials Center Librarian," she said. "Not long after I started, I was chatting with some of the student assistants who worked in the IMC and they asked me if I had seen the 'skin book' yet."

The book had been discovered in the P section-directly across from the IMC desk-years previously by another IMC student assistant who had been shelving books, Hamilton said.

"From what I gathered after it was found, older student assistants would take new hires out to the stacks to show them and have them touch the book," Hamilton said. "I really never thought about it outside that context, other than wondering why SRU had it in the first place. Several years passed, and during our barcoding project in the mid 90s, the book surfaced again and we made a decision at that point to move it to Special Collections, since it was starting to age. The librarians discussed the need to protect it from being handled too much. I am not sure it was ever used for anything or by anyone other than to showcase its oddity."

Silva said the book was written 1972, according to Voyager. But when the library had shifted from its old system to the current one, everything rolled over and was given a new creation date, she said.

According to Silva, it's impossible to tell when the library first received the book or how much it cost.

No one is around who might be able to remember specifically, though Marshall hints that it's been at Bailey Library longer than she has, which is at least 17 years.

The book is currently wrapped in acid-free tissue paper, nestled inside an acid-free box and tucked away alongside a rare book collection, Japan collection, historical children's collection and the Pennsylvania collection.