Henry Garnet

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 14, 2007

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A private buyer paid nearly $11,000 at a Dec. 2 auction for a book bound in the skin of an executed Jesuit priest. The macabre, 17th-century book tells the story of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and is covered in the hide of

Fr. Henry Garnet, head of the Jesuits in England who was executed May 3, 1606, for his alleged role in a Catholic plot to detonate 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath the British Parliament. It once was common for the skins of executed criminals to be used to cover books about their lives, a process called anthropodermic binding.