Joslin Hall Rare Books

I'm on the snail mail list for a bookstore in Northampton, Mass called Joslin Hall Rare Books (as usual, that's a Google-redirected "I'm feeling lucky" link—I sure hope it lands you at the bookstore if you click it).

I just checked out their web site, possibly for the first time, and it looks like they sell a broader variety of books than the ones that are reported in the catalog I receive periodically. It's called "A Grave Affair: Old & interesting books on gravestones, cemeteries, epitaphs, mourning customs, funerals & funeral customs."

Anyway, I look forward to browsing this catalog quite a bit. Long ago, somewhere, sometime, in that ancient age of pre-blog software blogging, somewhere on this web site [OK, where the f*** is it? OK...I found it...right here], I put up some images from a booklet I purchased from Joslin Hall on a competition held in Germany for WWI grave designs.

I've been mighty tempted to purchase further books from this outfit, but have always been able to resist the temptation when I looked at their prices. I'm not a rare book collector at all. Instead, I'm just interested in old and rare books. If something can be found online or in a reprint, I'm perfectly happy—I don't need the crumbling original.

The book descriptions in the GRAVE AFFAIR booklet are very carefully written. A typical one describes a 1843 book by John Thomas Walters titled A Tract upon Tomb-Stones: or, Suggestions for the Consideration of Person Intending to Set Up That Kind of Monument to the Memory of Deceased Friends. From the catalog:

The Reverend Paget [1806-1882], rector of Elford, did not care for much of what he saw in mid-19th century churchyards. Among the things that disturbed him—epitaphs made up of too-effusive flattery & "lies" meant to gloss-over the reputations and deeds of disreputable characters; epitaphs that ask the reader to pray for the souls of the deceased which bear a "a reference to the Popish doctrine of Purgatory" (no praying for the souls of deceased, if you please); eptitaphs declaring the deceased to be "worthy of Heaven or an innocent (as in a child), because all Men are sinner in the eyes of God; epitaphs that declare the deceased t be in Heaven—this is a problem because, well, hey, you never know, do you?

Wonderful stuff—lots more to be said about it, but it's time for bed.

[Not quite yet— here's a (somewhat old) issue of A GRAVE AFFAIR online!]

Something I learned from my iPod

AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" is not 90's Music.