The relationships between writing and memory, and between immortality and death have long been fundamental elements of the negotiation and exchange between readers and writers. Our texts are paradoxically marks of presence and absence, life and death at the same time. Usually this is not such an explicitly materialist issue, but at times in the history of writing this philosophical nexus has been quite actualized in the writing material themselves.

In the spirit of reading more than you really wanted to know, this post http://blogs.harvard.edu/houghton/2013/05/24/bound-in-human-skin/ from Harvard’s Houghton Library is a little creepy.