The Ranking of Binding Skins

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Alcide Raturon, perpetually provisional secretary of the Guild, in charge of awkward comparisons, defensive enthusiasms and the statistics one consults with a frown.

An old library, looked at from the side of its materials, is a herd. Goats, calves, sheep, sows, and a few more singular boarders of whom I shall speak at the end of this column, because the worst guest is always kept for dessert.

Let us first set out the hierarchy as three centuries of catalogues have fixed it and as prices still recite it.

At the summit, morocco: the goat, whose proud grain and deep dye have made it the garment of great occasions. Its rating is the only one that runs away with itself. With text and condition equal, a copy easily doubles or triples its price in passing from sheepskin to morocco, and catalogues pronounce the word with a relish they show nowhere else.

Then comes calf, the honest man of the shelf, which was in the classical age what the grey suit is to shareholders’ meetings: the uniform of respectability.

Then sheepskin (basane), the sheep, eternal third, whose very name serves as a reservation in a description. “Modest binding,” one says, and the sheep has carried for three centuries the modesty that was sewn onto it.

Lower still, pigskin, relegated to Germanic curiosities, and vellum, those whitish, cockled bindings that the French amateur regards while wondering what they are for.

The French reference is less peremptory, and it must be given its due.

Christian Galantaris, in his Manuel de bibliophilie, ranks copies in eight degrees:

At the first, the modern binding with short margins, on browned or foxed paper.

At the second, the modern binding with medium margins.

At the third, the old sheepskin binding, smooth spine or raised bands, undecorated or discreetly ornamented.

At the fourth, the old binding of ivory vellum, limp or with rigid boards.

At the fifth, old calf: brown, marbled, tree-calf, blond.

At the sixth, old morocco, Jansenist or with three gilt fillets.

At the seventh, morocco with dentelle borders, with coats of arms, with a super ex-libris.

At the eighth, the mosaic binding.

Let us hold on to the fourth degree: in Christian Galantaris, vellum comes ahead of sheepskin… and I believe we all agree with the master. The sow, for her part, appears nowhere in the scale, which is a politer way of showing her the door. Wrongly.

Here now is the second ranking, the one nobody displays, which orders the same skins by their sole capacity to last. First: pigskin. Second: vellum. Third: morocco. Fourth: calf. Last, and by a long way: sheepskin.

The two lists read almost backwards from one another.

Under the microscope, sheep is the worst-built of binding skins. Its grain layer alone takes up more than half the thickness, the glands that riddled it vanished in tanning and left a sponge, and the lower layer, loose and hollow, holds together only by fibres that the wool prevented from interlacing.

From this architecture follows the fault that every bookseller describes ten times a week without knowing he is describing anatomy: sheepskin “skins itself” (s’épiderme): its surface peels off in plaques from what lies beneath. Add the aggravation, which is a scandal of the late nineteenth century: leathers tanned with mimosa, whose condensed tannins fix the sulphuric acid of urban air and digest themselves by hydrolysis. This is red rot (la maladie rouge), which has reduced whole shelves of bindings to powder. Leather was industrialised at the very moment when it was being asked to last.

The sow is the exact opposite, and nobody takes account of it. A thick, hard skin with a triangular grain, it is frequently prepared not by tanning but by alum tawing, and tawed skins count among the most stable ever produced. The German pigskin bindings over wooden boards, those made between the middle of the sixteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth, stand today upright, flat and legible, their blind stamping still sharp, while the sheepskin of their Parisian great-great-grandcousins crumbles to dust.

And here is why the sow stays in last place: she is too stiff and too pale to be gilt. She refuses gold.

Vellum is the second defendant in this mock trial. An untanned skin, it is structurally out of reach of red rot: one cannot hydrolyse a tanning that never took place. Resistant to wear, it keeps the shape it was given in drying, and it supplied the most brutal proof of its worth where nobody expected it: in the Florence flood, the limp vellum bindings took the disaster without passing it on to the text block they enclosed. They rotted in the act of protecting.

Its fault is real and unique: vellum drinks the moisture of the air and cockles, which has the unpardonable drawback of being visible from afar. As for its price, it says nothing of its quality and everything of its past. Limp vellum was often, after the invention of printing, the binding of waiting and economy, the one a book was given before a proper binder took it in hand.

Morocco, king of skins, is dear because the goat came from far away, from the Levant and then from Barbary, whence the name. It happens that it is also excellent (close fibre, resistant grain, steady colour, centuries on the clock), but the market had not foreseen this and learned it after the fact. For pigskin and vellum, it never learned it.

I come to the guest at dessert, whom I ask to be forgiven for serving with tongs. There exist, at the extreme margins of this market in skins, bindings that owe nothing to the herd: the so-called anthropodermic bindings, in human skin. Whatever the amateurs of shivers may hope, the affair is less gothic and more bourgeois than one dreams. The vogue was above all medical and fin-de-siècle, practitioners having a treatise bound in the skin of departed subjects, out of a positivism that took itself for homage. For a long time these objects circulated at the price of curiosities, half whispered and half displayed, their rarity silencing the rest.

Then the laboratory came along, and I enter two sets of facts in the file, for they tell everything about our age and a little about the one before.

The first is statistical, hence to my taste: of the thirty-one copies reputed human that the American census programme submitted to spectrometry, eighteen were and thirteen were not. Calf, sheep, goat and pig, in short the complete farm, which leaves one pensive about three generations of experts who recognised human skin by eye and by touch.

The second is moral: the institutions that held authentic ones have begun to withdraw them from consultation, and one of the largest American university libraries has had removed the binding of a work on the destiny of the soul, in which a French physician had, in the last century, covered his copy with the skin of a woman patient who died in a hospital, and whom nobody had thought to consult.

Prices pass, herds remain, and the best ranked are not always those that stay standing. Nevertheless, one must take care not to “rank” too much, and many a pretty gilt vellum has in my eyes more qualities than shiny moroccos.

Editor’s note. The eight-degree scale is that of Christian Galantaris, Manuel de bibliophilie. The ranking by sturdiness is not our own invention: the report of the Society of Arts on binding leather, of which Leather for Libraries (1905) is the public version, gives it in so many words and puts pigskin first (“the strongest leather made is pigskin”), the goat coming only third. The structural fragility of sheep (spongy grain layer, loose dermis, tendency to peel) and the stability of alum-tawed skins are documented in the conservation literature, and French restorers describe it in the same terms: sheep leathers “have a lamellar structure and tend to flake off” (« ont une structure lamellaire, ont tendance à se desquamer »). Red rot strikes by preference the nineteenth-century leathers tanned with condensed tannins.

The limp vellum bindings of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence suffered the damage of the 1966 flood without passing it on to the text blocks.

Anthropodermic bindings really did exist, chiefly in nineteenth-century medical circles. The Anthropodermic Book Project submitted 31 of the roughly 50 copies reputed to be such to peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF): 18 were authenticated as human, 13 as animal skin.

In March 2024 Harvard had removed the binding of Des destinées de l’âme by Arsène Houssaye (1879), covered by Dr Ludovic Bouland in the skin of a woman who died in hospital, taken without consent.

GUILDE · AR/TROUPEAU

Document classified: restricted circulation.

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IGLI Clinical Files: Thierry B., the Man Who Counted the Books He Did Not Buy

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

Special Zoobibliological Surveillance Service — General Inspectorate of the Printed Book (IGLI)

By Doctor Fulbert de Cuirac, sworn veterinarian of printed entities, expert to the Bureau of Abnormal Manifestations of the Book, commissioned for owner-adhesion disorders and heraldic-bibliological rejection phenomena.

The service received a written declaration, made spontaneously, in the margin of a fable that M. Philibert Cramoisi published on Facebook. It is reproduced here in full, without correction or cut:

“I keep up, with application, in a little Exacompta notebook, the exact count of all the books I do not buy. And well, imagine, Monsieur Cramoisi, that for the year 2026 alone I have bought only 10 and let 1795 get away. Which makes exactly 1795 regrets.”

— Thierry B., 26 August 2026.

M. Cramoisi forwarded the item to the service, rightly judging that it belonged less to fable than to clinical practice.

Mlle Lépine having copied the item into the register, the service examined its terms. Four call for comment.

“with application” — the subject himself qualifies his diligence, and qualifies it favorably. He does not report a failing: he reports a bearing. The service stresses the complete absence of shame, the usual marker of settled forms.

“a little Exacompta notebook” — the precision of the brand is deliberate. The subject did not take a diary, nor a notebook, nor one of those Moleskine notebooks in which amateurs record their desires. He took a trade ledger, ruled in columns. He does not confide. He keeps the accounts.

“let get away” — hunting vocabulary. The verb supposes that the quarry was within reach, that it moved, and that it left. The service observes that the subject does not say given up on, or set aside, or judged too expensive: he describes 1,795 escapes.

“exactly 1795 regrets” — this is where the declaration tips over. The subject no longer counts books, he counts regrets.

Observations. Over the 239 days elapsed of the 2026 financial year: volumes acquired, 10; volumes let get away, 1,795; total volumes examined, 1,805.

The rate of renunciation stands at 7.5 volumes a day, Sundays included. The residual half-volume has been carried to the account of the odd volumes.

The acquisition ratio is 1 to 179.5. The service knows of no living collection in the département with a rejection rate of that height; the books would not survive in it. That is precisely what held our attention.

Mlle Lépine raised, with the firmness for which she is known, an objection of procedure.

The register of entries admits only entities furnished with a shelfmark. Now the 1,795 volumes of the notebook have entered no collection, have received no bookplate, and have been the object of no owner adhesion. They have neither spine, nor shelf, nor owner. They fall under no jurisdiction known to the service. This library of regrets is a non-library.

After examination, the Bureau rules as follows.

A book that is regretted, dated, numbered and carried in a column exists sufficiently to fall under our jurisdiction. These entities will be classed under the denomination libri praetermissi — the volumes passed over — and will open a separate series in the register. The shelfmark will be assigned to them without any indication of location, the box remaining empty.

Mlle Lépine signed, adding in pencil in the margin that she carried it out but did not share it. The service places the note on file.

Diagnosis. Neurosis bibliocomputatrix privativa — privative computational neurosis, benign form, slow course.

Not to be confused with ordinary bibliomania, of which it is the exact reverse. The bibliomaniac accumulates what he owns and ruins himself. The subject accumulates what he does not own and spends nothing. His non-library counts 1,795 volumes that he does not have.

Sub-Inspector Peutre, in charge of the on-site report, points out that this is to date the only collection in the département posing no conservation problem: no dust, no acidification, no foxing, no worms, no humidity-control requirement, no shelving, no disputed estate. The service acknowledges the remark as exact and judges it misplaced.

Prognosis and recommendations. The prognosis is favorable, subject to the following reservations.

1. The notebook will be maintained. The service warns against any well-meant attempt by the subject’s circle to do away with it: the uncounted regret does not disappear.

2. The subject Thierry B. is prescribed to acquire, within 6 months, 1 volume drawn at random from those he has let get away, and to record its effect. The service wishes to determine whether possession relieves or aggravates. It inclines toward aggravation.

3. At the observed rate, the pagination of the Exacompta will be exhausted before the winter of 2031. The service recommends opening a second volume now and having it bound in calf, so that the collection of the absent has at least a spine.

VISA

Dr. Fulbert de Cuirac, sworn veterinarian of printed entities — examination and diagnosis
Mlle Berthe Lépine, at the register — subject to the reservation entered in the margin
Sub-Inspector Achille Peutre — on-site report and verification of the columns
For the Guild of Bibliopolices.

Shelfmark: IGLI/SSSZ/CI/[N] — Libri praetermissi

Document classified: restricted circulation — Guild IGLI.
Reproduction discouraged on gummed paper unless necessary.