Harvard University removes human skin from book cover. However, it is still unclear who it came from.
The book also made headlines in Germany in 2014 when an investigation revealed that it was bound in human skin. It is a copy of "Des destinées de l'âme" (in German: On the fate of the soul), which the French writer Arsène Houssaye first published in 1879. He bound the book with skin "that he had taken without consent from the body of a deceased patient in the hospital where he worked"