Human Skin-Covered Book Up for Auction

Human Skin-Covered Book With 'Ghost Face' Up for Auction

It is thought the skin was cut from the corpse of one of Guy Fawkes' fellow conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, an attempt to blow up the British Parliament in a bid to kill King James I.

Called "A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings Against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet A Jesuit and His Confederates," it tells of the grisly end met by the Gunpowder Plotters. Fawkes prepared the explosives for the event and is remembered annually in the U.K. on Nov. 5 with fireworks.

It was published in 1606, just months after the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet was captured and executed for his part in the plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

If this is the skin of a Catholic martyr, it is potentially a first-class relic. However, in any event, I wish I had the funds to participate in the auction and provide it a proper resting place - which in my mind is not a museum where crowds can gawk.

And what would be the attraction?

[The owner] believes that marks on the leather are evidence of torture, and says a Latin inscription on the cover which reads "severe penitence punished the flesh" was written to make sure people knew what had happened to the victim.

Grotesque.