Light relief from all the rumours of wars in recent posts comes in the news that Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has angered fans by publishing his autobiography-in-pictures as a leather-bound, silk-wrapped ‘work of art’ retailing at £445. Printed on ‘fine art paper’ in a limited edition of 2,500 copies, the book will join a long tradition of luxury publications stretching back to the origins of the codex–a tradition largely invisible to the average modern reader, for whom the idea of the book is tied to ideas of egalitarianism, democracy, and the free (or cheap) exchange of information. Page linked his choice of medium to his own desire to have a library and his appreciation of fine bookbinding.

Meanwhile this week’s Times Literary Supplement has a blood-red triangle in a corner of the front cover, advertising an article on ‘books bound in human skin’. ‘Anthropodermic bibliopegy’, the article reports, took off in the eighteenth century, ‘when binding the Lives of executed criminals in their own skin became a bit of a fad.’ An example, a copy of a blank paper book supposedly bound in ‘Tanned Skin from the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence’, is currently on display in a Wellcome Collection exhibition entitled ‘Skin‘. The TLS piece, by Jill Lepore of Harvard, does a wonderful job of teasing out the historical ambiguities that accumulate around this volume. Let’s hope it doesn’t give Jimmy Page any gruesome ideas.