The Ranking of Binding Skins

25 October 2026 Hugues Market & Auctions 0

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.

La lettre du bibliophile

Si cette chronique vous a plu : recevez trois nouvelles par semaine — livres rares, reliures, enchères, et les Dossiers IGLI. 18 ans d'archives, quelques milliers de lecteurs.

Pas de pub, pas de revente de données. Désabonnement en un clic.

À lire ensuite

IGLI Clinical Files: The Unspeakable in Bibliophilia — Inaugural Study and Call for Witnesses

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

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Doctor Fulbert de Cuirac, sworn veterinarian of printed entities, expert to the Bureau of Abnormal Manifestations of the Book, seconded for disorders of proprietary adhesion and heraldico-bibliological rejection phenomena, assisted in the keeping of the register by Miss Berthe Lépine, archivist of unavowable cases.

Preamble: why the IGLI, for the first time, turns its stethoscope. Since its foundation the IGLI had auscultated only the book. We recorded the fevers of the copy, the reddening of the page, the rejections of the ex-libris, the À rebours astray by a century. The patient, always, was made of paper; the observer, always, of flesh.

Now it has come to us (and the Bureau of Abnormal Manifestations has deliberated on it gravely) that a second entity deserved surveillance: the one who holds the book. The bibliophile himself. For if the book has its pathologies, its owner has more secret ones still, and less treated. We group these pathologies under a single nosological entity, the unspeakable (l’indicible), designated in IGLI nomenclature by the term bibliophilic taciturnity (taciturnitas bibliophilica): the whole of the behaviours that every amateur practises, that no amateur avows, and whose collective silence makes it, to this day, the best-shared and worst-documented disease of our discipline.

The IGLI therefore opens its first register of zoobibliology applied to the human subject. The present file sets out its protocol, describes the inaugural case, and issues, at the foot of the article, a call for witnesses from which we expect much.

Study protocol. Working definition. Held to be unspeakable is any bibliophilic act that the subject performs regularly, that he knows to be widespread, and that he would nonetheless conceal from his spouse, his bookseller, his confessor and, cardinal symptom, from himself.

The unspeakable is distinguished from simple mania in that it is accompanied by shame; and from vice in that it is harmless to others. It is a benign affection as to the body, severe as to self-esteem.

Method. Collection of voluntary confessions, anonymised, classified by syndrome. The subject is not judged; he is recorded. The IGLI recalls that no testimony will be passed on to heirs, auctioneers or insurers.

Inaugural case: founding subject of the register, Mr. Hugues O. So as not to ask of others what he would refuse to deliver himself, the founder of the present register has made himself its first subject. Initials kept at his express request: H. O. Anamnesis established by self-declaration, cross-checked by examination of his shelves.

Observation no. 1: tropism for the nineteenth-century binding. The subject confesses a marked, exclusive, almost tender preference for nineteenth-century morocco. Where the doctrine of good taste commands reverence for the great bindings of the classical centuries, subject H. O. avows that he prefers the nineteenth-century morocco, of an age that purists judge decadent.

Diagnosis. An aesthetic tropism, assumed but socially costly. The subject knows his preference to be a minority one; he maintains it; he blushes slightly at it when speaking aloud, and proudly in silence. A chronic affection, without gravity, contagious by frequenting the stalls.

Observation no. 2: monomaniacal polyexemplarity (Bovary form). The subject declares that he holds several first editions of the same title, namely Madame Bovary (Michel Lévy frères, two volumes, 1857). Not one, which would be a collection; not two, which would be prudence; but several, which falls (the IGLI notes it without condemning it) under monomaniacal polyexemplarity, the characteristic Bovary form.

Mechanism observed. Each copy is justified separately: this one for its binding, that one for its freshness, this third because it was there and one does not leave Bovary to somebody else. The subject cannot add up his justifications without blushing, nor subtract them without suffering. Typical symptom: he knows the exact number of his copies and will not say it.

Diagnosis. Affective accumulation disguised as bibliographic rigour. Prognosis guarded: the Bovary form readily extends to a second title, then a third.

Observation no. 3: growing acquisitive inhibition. The most recent symptom, and the most painful. The subject, formerly a resolute buyer, declares that he finds it harder and harder to buy. The basket fills and is not validated. The bid is prepared and is not placed. The hand rises over the catalogue and falls back.

Discussion. The IGLI distinguishes here three aetiologies, often intertwined. The first, pecuniary: the shelves are full, the purse less so. The second, subtler, which we name melancholy satiety of the advanced collector: by dint of choosing well, the subject no longer finds anything that surpasses what he owns, and purchase, once a feast, becomes arbitration, then renunciation. The third, finally, exogenous, which we class under the heading of circumstantial disaffection (taedium mercatus): here it is not the subject who falters, but the milieu that drives him away. Disgust at the experts’ estimates, ever more confident and seldom more accurate, turns the eye from the catalogue at the precise moment when the hand should be raised; the swelling of buyer’s fees adds to each hammer price a second, dissuasive hammer price; time is lacking to push open the doors of booksellers; salons and fairs weary; and the practice, little by little, goes digital, until the amateur buys only on screen, and so less and less. A collective aetiology disguised as an individual symptom: the subject believes himself cured of desire when he is merely discouraged by circumstances. A paradoxical form in every case, where the illness cures itself of its own symptom, and the subject complains of it, which proves he is not cured.

Plate of the IGLI: Map of the seats of the unspeakable (taciturnitas bibliophilica). Period engraving, nomenclature reassigned. Classmark IGLI/SSSZ/IND/01.

Ancillary observations (declared at the end of the interview, in a lower voice). The subject conceded, under the seal of the register: that he sometimes sniffs the spine of a volume before opening it; that he has bought books he has not read and has no intention of reading; and that he once, perhaps twice, rounded down the price of an acquisition when asked at home. The IGLI records without comment. These three facts constitute, by themselves, the universal foundation of the unspeakable.

Outline of a nosography. From this first case the IGLI draws a provisional grid of the syndromes of the unspeakable, to be completed by testimonies.

Polyexemplarity syndrome: holding the same title in several states, and keeping the count quiet.

Acquisitive inhibition: wanting, being able, and not concluding.

Shameful tropism: openly loving what good taste barely tolerates.

Bibliophilic olfaction: smelling before reading.

Unread acquisition: owning the text, ignoring its content.

Conjugal price minoration: the delicate art of rounding down.

Call for witnesses. The IGLI solicits the cooperation of the community. Every subject is invited to declare himself, anonymously, by answering in a comment, or by discreet channel (a sealed note slipped between two shelves, a confidence whispered to a sworn bookseller, or that email written at midnight which is sent only at the third attempt), the questionnaire below. One rule only: lie only by half, which is already a great deal.

1. How many copies of the same title do you own, and to how many would you admit in public?

2. When did you last give up a purchase you desired, and why did you forgive yourself?

3. Do you smell your books? At what precise moment?

4. Which volume in your library have you never read, and would you defend it tooth and nail?

5. Have you ever rounded down? (This question will not be kept. That is false, but it will put you at ease.)

6. What symptom, mania or small unavowable rite has the IGLI omitted from this grid? Describe it without shame: you may be the inaugural case of a syndrome that has no name yet, and that could bear yours.

The answers will feed the second file, in which the IGLI hopes to establish that the unspeakable is not an individual fault, but the normal, and secretly happy, state of the bibliophile species.

Provisional diagnosis and recommendation. Subject H. O. suffers from no grave affection. He suffers, like all of us, from bibliophilia at the stage where it ceases to be spoken. The IGLI prescribes neither withdrawal nor cure: shame is here the only side effect, and sharing the only remedy. Let everyone confess, and nobody will blush alone any more.

Final recommendation: go on buying with measure, smelling with discretion, and counting one’s Bovarys in a low voice.

Document classified: restricted circulation — Guilde IGLI. Reproduction inadvisable on gummed paper without necessity.

Filing classmark: IGLI/SSSZ/IND/01 — The unspeakable, inaugural case and call for witnesses.

By Doctor Fulbert de Cuirac, sworn veterinarian of printed entities, for the Guilde des Bibliopolicés; register kept by Miss Berthe Lépine.

— Continuer la balade —

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