I’m a librarian, writer, and proponent of the death positive movement. I’ve found some people assume that being death positive means a certain callousness. For me the opposite is true: I’m an anxious ball of feelings both for myself and towards others, and the death positive mindset helps me cope better with life’s curveballs. I can say with a degree of certainty that we’ve all been pitched some doozies lately, so I wanted to offer up some books that nourish in times of darkness without turning away in denial.
In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy―the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world’s most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship.
In Dark Archives―captivating and macabre in all the right ways―Rosenbloom has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.
I am like the Johnny Appleseed of this book; I’ve given it to the closest friends and the most casual acquaintances from very different walks of life, whether they are the person suffering a loss or a person supporting someone suffering one because guess what? We’ll all be both at different points in our lives. We can also define loss and its accompanying grief broadly; this book helped me show up for a friend during her divorce, for instance. If I could mandate a national book club that compelled us all to read one book, I’d pick this one.
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