The Book of Human Skin (72 page)
Bouland wrote inside:
‘This curious little book about virginity and the generative functions of women seeming to me to merit a re-rendering congruent with the subject, has been re-dressed in a piece of the skin of a woman tanned for myself with some sumac.’
The identity of the woman is unknown. My descriptions of Gianni’s reactions to the book are based on my own, when I went to examine this volume at the Wellcome Library.
It is not known what happened to the skin of Tupac Amaru II after his parts were displayed in different towns in Peru: the book bound in it is an invention.
There are no records of
Frankenstein
or
Pride and Prejudice
being bound in human skin. However, both novels were first published in the period when this novel is set and Minguillo would have heard of the sensations they caused. Some novels have suffered human bindings, including a tattooed copy of
The Three Musketeers
, which belonged to a French doctor at the turn of the last century. (This same doctor is said to have had a copy of Mercier de Compiègne’s
L’éloge du seins des femmes – In praise of women’s breasts
– bound in the skin of a human breast, with the nipple clearly visible in the centre of the front cover.) There is also the case of an 1852 edition of Milton being rebound in the skin of the Exeter rat-catcher George Cudmore, who had killed his stepdaughter.
And so it is very possible for an innocent book to have its original binding torn off and replaced by something more alarming. There may be many books of human skin as yet unidentified in public and private libraries around the world. The tanning process tends to darken human leather so it is indistinguishable from normal book bindings. A microscope and some expert knowledge are required to tell it apart from pigskin.
Michelle Lovric,
London and Venice, March 2010
Acknowledgements
This book’s research in Venice, Cuzco and Arequipa was completed with the help of a grant from the Arts Council, England. [logo required]. I would particularly like to thank Charles Beckett for his encouragement through the long process of writing this novel.
I am indebted to William Helfand, Vladimir Lovric and Jane Topple for checking my medical history, to Dr Christopher Rowland Payne for casting his kind professional eye over dermatological detail, and to Kristina Blagojevitch for Spanish translations and editorial assistance.
On the island of San Servolo, I was given generous access to the
manicomio
archives by Professor Luigi Armiato of la Fondazione I.R.S.E.C. Simon Chaplin at the Hunterian Museum in London was generous with time and advice.
Dennis Vandervelde, President of the Disinfected Mail Study Circle, advised me on the quarantine procedures, and organised an unforgettable trip to the deserted island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio in Venice’s lagoon during the summer of 2008. Alessandro Fuga and Roberto Roselli from the Consorzio Venezia Nuova were kind enough to show us around the island, along with Dottore Umberto Bocus.
For access to materials and people in Arequipa, I thank Francesco Bandarin and Luis Sardón and also Giovanna Salini at the Peruvian Embassy in London.
I am grateful to Silvia Evangelisti and Mary Laven for their expertise on Venetian nuns.
In Santa Catalina, I was given every variety of help a writer and researcher could desire by Bradley W. Silva, then director, by Isabel and Carmen Olivares, restorers at the convent, and most particularly by both Dante Zegarra and Alejandro Málaga Núñez-Zeballos, historians of the city of Arequipa. The Santa Catalina guide Laura Salazar García helped me find physical contexts for all the turns of my plot inside the convent. I am also grateful to Mauricio Romañes for background on Arequipa and its history.
The historians Kathryn Burns and Sarah Chambers were both generous with advice and help, though any factual errors that cannot be conveniently attributed to deliberate artistic licence remain my own.
As ever, I am endlessly grateful to Victoria Hobbs at A.M. Heath, who does so much more than I ever thought an agent would. It’s been a very happy experience to work with Alexandra Pringle, Helen Garnons-Williams and Erica Jarnes at Bloomsbury, and with Audrey Cotterell, the copy-editor.
The manuscript was given a thorough cleansing, battering and revivifying by my writing friends, Pamela Johnson, Cheryl Moskowitz, Mary Hamer, Mavis Gregson, Carol DeVaughn, Geraldine Paine, Annabel Chown, Paola de Carolis, Ann Vaughan-Williams, Sarah Salway, Jane Kirwan, Sue Ehrhardt, Jill Foulston, Patricia Guy, Carole Satyamurti and Louise Berridge.
As ever, I am grateful to the staff at the British Library, London Library and most particularly the Library at the Wellcome Collection.
A NOTE ON THE TYPES
The text for this book is set in the following types:
Perpetua is an adaptation of a style of letter that had been popularized for monumental work in stone by Eric Gill. Large scale drawings by Gill were given to Charles Malin, a Parisian punch-cutter, and his hand cut punches were the basis for the font issued by Monotype. First used in a private translation called
The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity
, the italic was originally called Felicity.
Guardi was designed by Reinhard Haus of Linotype in 1987. It was named after the Guardi brothers, Gianantonio and Francesco, the last famous artists from the Renaissance Venetian school of painting. It is based on the Venetian text styles of the fifteenth century. The influence of characters originally written with a feather can be seen in many aspects of this modern alphabet.
Caxton was designed by Leslie Usherwood in 1981. Caxton is an Old Style design with small serifs, and short ascenders and descenders.
Berling roman is a modern face designed by K. E. Forsberg between 1951 and 1958. In spite of its youth it does carry the characteristics of an old face. The serifs are inclined and blunt, and the g has a straight ear.
Bell was designed in 1788 by Richard Austin while working in John Bell’s British Type Foundry. Bell, impressed by the clarity and contrast found in contemporary French typefaces cut by Firmin Didot, wanted his foundry to offer a British version. Austin, a skilful punchcutter who first trained as an engraver, produced a sharply serifed face, like Didot in its contrast of thick and thin strokes, but more like Baskerville in its use of bracketed, less rectilinear, serifs. Stanley Morison later described the face as the first English modern typeface.
Bembo was first used in 1495 by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius for Cardinal Bembo’s
De Aetna
, and was cut for Manutius by Francesco Griffo. It was one of the types used by Claude Garamond (1480–1561) as a model for his Romain de L’Universitë, and so it was the forerunner of what became standard European type for the following two centuries. Its modern form follows the original types and was designed for Monotype in 1929.
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Penguin Canada The Book Of Human Skin