What are their stories? Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, mental patients, beautiful women, and indigents whose lives are bound together in this rare, scattered, and disquieting collection. Dozens of these books still sit on the shelves of the world's most famous libraries and museums.

Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom, a medical librarian and a cofounder of the Death Salon, seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind this anthropodermic bibliopegy. There are books out there, some shelved unwittingly next to ordinary texts, that are bound in human skin.

This select proceedings of the Dark Archives events of 2019-21 presents the first overview of the emergent field of Dark Archives studies, and its framing just how large is the totality of medieval writing and its interrelations (or 'Graphosphere'), extant and destroyed, and what materials is it composed of? What digital technologies are emerging to scan, transcribe and order this totality, a task otherwise beyond uncountable human scholarly lifetimes? More what of the physical record can, cannot, or can only be captured digitally? What worlds of scholarship and knowledge might we build upon a fully-mapped Graphosphere? Our pioneering contributors present the wealth of approaches now being marshalled in quest of answers, from manuscript statistics, the reconstruction of lost documents, fragmentology, optical character recognition, crowdsourcing and spectrography, to the metaphysical reconsideration of knowledge and of the archive.Print Dark Archives - A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin Yet this constraint is fast disappearing as a range of new technologies transform our understanding of the Dark Archives and thus of the medieval, to an extent unseen since the invention of movable type and voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century delimited the medieval period itself. In our age of unprecedented access to information, the handwritten records of the medieval era remain overwhelmingly dark - unread and unreadable - confining modern scholarship to a tiny fraction of their totality.

Dark archives book