Human history is full of rare books, both real and fictional. From the Voynich Manuscript (which still divides experts) to the famous Necronomicon (a wonderful invention of H.P. Lovecraft), some pieces are simply irresistible because of the mystery that surrounds them, or because of a macabre detail associated with their printing. One of those books is Shadows from the Walls of Death, written by Dr. Robert M. Kedzie and printed in 1874. In simple terms, if someone handles it without protection, they could end up dead.
A very unusual practice when binding books is the so-called anthropodermic bibliopegy, and as its name suggests... it uses human skin. Some of our readers might think that one has to be too crazy to make a book like that, but to date it has been confirmed (using different techniques) that more than a dozen books actually have human skin on their exterior, including a copy that dates back to the year 1568.
There is something definitely fascinating about the idea of a macabre book, whether for its content or its binding. The simple fact that they have been impregnated with death places them in a different category, and they almost automatically become collector's pieces. Following that line, how about a book that can kill the imprudent reader...?
The book that could kill its reader
Shadows from the Walls of Death is a publication by Dr. Robert M. Kedzie, who served as a surgeon in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and later became a chemistry professor at what is now Michigan State University (MSU). One of Kedzie's goals was to warn the public about the dangers of arsenic, which was combined with copper for decades to create colorful wallpapers intended for interior decoration.
That detail fully reveals the nature of the book: its pages are saturated with potentially lethal levels of arsenic, so handling it requires gloves, and if possible, respiratory protection. One of Kedzie's (correct) hypotheses was that over time, the toxic papers generated microparticles of dust that could poison entire families for decades... slowly.
As part of his campaign, Kedzie created a total of one hundred copies, and distributed them in public libraries across Michigan with precise instructions to never allow children near the book. Shadows from the Walls of Death barely devotes a couple of pages to text, which includes a quote from Leviticus 14:37, which speaks of the quarantine of infected houses. The remaining 86 pages are nothing more than samples of wallpapers taken from local merchants.
Kedzie's message reached so deep that most librarians cut their losses by destroying their copies, and only four copies survived. Two of them remain in Michigan (one at MSU, the other at the University of Michigan), the third is at the Harvard Medical School, and the fourth remained in the possession of the National Library of Medicine, which decided to digitize it so that anyone interested can explore it without risk.
Source: Atlas Obscura. Access the book: here.
