Graveyard humor and a Misale

D. Hillson published this series of epitaphs on postcards in 1907, but I haven’t been able to find out anything about the publisher or the set. The first one I saw – many years ago – was the “Listen: Mother Aunt and Me…” which contains the word “misale.” (Not to mention poor grammar!) The word puzzled me, and it does still. I can’t find reference to it, not even in my unabridged Webster’s nor in the full set of Oxford English Dictionary (nor the supplements) on my library shelves. One can assume that it means something on the order of “misjudged” but who among you can find the true definition and source?

For some reason our species has enjoyed this rather macabre form of humor for centuries. What is the attraction? Perhaps it is because we, among all species on Earth, are aware of our mortality. Knowing that each of us will eventually die, perhaps we have this need to thumb our noses at Death. Not to mention the desire – sometimes realized on actual headstones – to have the last word.

I let the postcards speak for themselves.









Sorry the layout is so sloppy! Dang HTML is hard to put in place.

What do these three books have in common?

A while back I wrote about the synchronicity of finding a common thread in the diverse books one reads. So I recently finished Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Byron Rogers' The Green Lane to Nowhere, and Alexander McCall Smith’s Tears of the Giraffe.

The first is a series of essays that Bryson wrote for a British newspaper when he moved back to the United States with his English wife and children after living in England for 20 years. The Green Lane is a writer’s life in an English Village. (And no, that’s not the thread.) The Tears of The Giraffe is a title in the "No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency" series.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels are set in Botswana, where Precious Ramotswe (a woman of traditional figure, according to her) investigates the usual domestic situations, as well as local mysteries, from the unexplained appearance of a pumpkin to a missing American and various other matters. Precious has a sensitivity and intuition that often inform her solutions. Smith, a white Botswana, obviously loves the country, the culture, and the people. In this novel, both Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni (her husband, but always referred to thus even by Precious) lament the loss of old-fashioned cultural values, traditions, etiquette, neighborliness, etc. in the face of modern “progress.” And this is where we find our theme – the loss of culture and community.


Bryson nails it with his essays on an America that has changed much even in the time he has been gone. Neighborhoods, he says, are no longer communities. You may know your nearest neighbors, but you usually have very little in common. Gone are the small communities where everyone not only knew, but supported each other, where neighbors came together in times of need, helped each other, watched out for each other’s children. Shopping areas have become faceless malls, local businesses have withered under the onslaught of chain and discount stores. As for common courtesies, even their memory is fading.



Rogers echoes this subject in this very interesting and amusing book which is, again, drawn from columns published in a British newspaper, this time The Sunday Telegraph. Writing about his small village in geographically strategic Northamtonshire, Rogers tracks the region’s early history, pointing out, for instance, that the current A5 highway traces the path of an ancient Roman road. But throughout he mourns the loss of community, stating that “city people” have bought up most of his village’s real estate for weekend retreats, pricing the locals out of the neighborhood. He muses on this as the village clears out after the weekend, leaving a handful of permanent residents during the week. A man in a tavern is mourning not only the loss of a parent, but of the tradition that once brought neighbors to the homes of bereaved families, bearing food and comfort. Most of the small community traditions and observations have been forgotten.

Some will call this progress, but each of these authors suggests that the world could be a better place with a little bit of return to some of the traditional ways of caring for each other, of respecting each other, of aiding each other in times of crisis, of forming communities of common interests and vesting in common welfare; even of just plain politeness. I’m convinced that most of us who remember some of the earlier ways mourn in similar fashion. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

The Creepiest Postcard I Have Ever Seen

Over the years I have handled many types of postcard, from the earliest chromolithograph cards offering scenes, greetings, sites, events such as World Fairs and expositions, and on through the eras of photography, color printing, and linens.

I have seen postcards made of cactus wood, celluloid, redwood, leather, burlap, embroidered silk and other materials. Many cards were made that incorporated elements such as feathers, ribbons, bows, buttons, “rolling” eyes, horsehair tails, fur, plant materials, etc. There have been puzzle cards, transformation cards, “hold-to-light” cards, and other gimmicks.

Just about any subject under the sun has been stuck on a postcard! But in all that, ONE stands out as the weirdest, creepiest, oddest card I have seen. I have kept it just because it is such a puzzle. It is an image of a cat, mailed in 1910 and probably produced around that time.

Of course, cats have always been popular as subject-matter, as much as they are today.




Some were sweet, like a colorful chromo-lithograph card of kittens mailed from Toledo, Ohio, in 1911.



Photographers loved the subject, as a photo card of two kittens and straw hat from the Rotograph Co. with a copyright date of 1905 demonstrates.




Cultural biases notwithstanding, a black cat with googly eyes purports to be a “good luck mascot” on a card mailed in 1915.









But there is just no explanation for this evil-looking cat dressed as a woman, and with the caption, “There is’nt [sic] an honest man living. I hate ‘em all.” The publishing information is K.V.I.B, 12 “serie 1255” on a divided back. I can’t find much information about this company, which seemed to be fairly prolific in production at the turn of the century. The card was no doubt printed in Germany. It was mailed in 1910, somewhere in Eastern Washington, probably Tacoma. (The cancellation is only partial, although “T” is visible and the sender describes having gone to Yakima for dental work.) She sent the card to her sister in Broken Bow, Nebraska.

There is no indication of the artist, although he or she must have been somewhat – um – odd to have produced this message and image. I had thought that it might be by Louis Wain, a postcard artist whose schizophrenia caused him to create some devilish cats later in his career, but a Wain collector has assured me that this is not his work. Perhaps it was an attempt to imitate him. The cat itself looks rather evil, with fangs visible, ears like devil horns, and glassy, staring eyes. I do love the effect of the tail thrown over the arm, the only bit of comic relief on the entire card. I still find it very, very creepy though.

A Book That Explores the Altered Heart

For all of us who do artwork with “repurposed” materials, it is sometimes hard to explain the sticks, stones, bark and bones; the rusty thing-a-jigs and discarded parts and things picked up in parking lots; the packaging and papers and ratty old books and labels and tickets and….well, all of it. Dubbed “packrats” and “magpies,” we excuse our mania in the name of art, but the little tides of guilt as spouses complain of overflow and friends try to reassure themselves that we are just a little bit sane still sweep over us from time to time.

Now here is a book that offers not only forgiveness, but which also commends our ardor and eggs us on:

Art Making – Collections and Obsessions: An Intimate Exploration of the Mixed-Media Work and Collections of 35 Artists, by Lynne Perrella.

Most of us can only aspire to such “collections,” but the ones in this book are bound to inspire new heights of mania in those of us already touched with the “gift” of seeing beauty in discarded things. While the work of every artist will not appeal to everyone, there is such a wide variety of artistic vocabularies, methods, and themes that there is a lot to appeal to anyone. Seeing how others gather and harvest and organize or store their materials is bound to inspire.

Best of all, we find ourselves in very good company. We no longer have to cringe when someone says “but WHY do you have all this stuff?” or “what do you DO with it?” or worst of all, when a spouse inquires, “what are you going to use it for?” Now we simply wave this book at them and shout THIS! THIS!

Feels good.

Will Bradley Kicked off the 20th Century in Style!

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1868, William H. Bradley was already working as a printer by the time he was 12 years old. A man of many talents, he worked as a wood engraver, typographer, publisher, editor, illustrator, poster artist, type designer, book artist, film art supervisor, designer, and he even designed several family homes.

Often compared to Aubrey Beardsley, Bradley developed a style that drew from the Arts & Crafts movement and William Morris, Japanese woodblock prints, and he is often credited with developing and popularizing the Art Nouveau style in America.


He had wide influence as a poster designer, but also did numerous magazines covers for Collier’s, Good Housekeeping, the Inland Printer, and others. He became a consultant to the American Type Founders, designing type faces (among them Wayside Roman, Missal Initials, Bewick Roman, and others) and he also edited and wrote for their The American Chapbook.

In 1915 he went to work for William Randolph Hearst, among other things serving as art supervisor to a series of Hearst-produced films, and subsequently acting as head art supervisor of the Hearst empire of magazines and newspapers.




Much of Bradley’s illustrative work is done in strong black-and-white images, flat tones, and with the fluid and nature-inspired lines of Art Nouveau. His artwork is as much appreciated today (if not more) than it was 100 years ago.


In 1954, the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) awarded Bradley a gold medal, the highest award for a graphic artist. He died in 1962 at the age of 94.

Remarkable Creatures: The Fictionalized Story of Mary Anning

Right before Christmas I was zooming through a new bookstore looking for a particular gift book, and as I passed the end of a gondola my gaze fell on this: Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures. The cover is attractive and the title provocative, and when I flipped the book over and read that it was a novel about Mary Anning it went directly into my shopping basket.

What could be better than a novel based on one of the 19th Century’s most significant fossil hunters? Mary Anning was an uneducated working-class woman in a culture where social stature, breeding, and education were part of a severe caste system. All of which mitigated against her receiving the kind of acknowledgement and acclaim that her discoveries deserved. She discovered the plesiosaurus, the ichthyosaurus, and other fossils that turned early 19th-Century assumptions inside out. (Not only did she find the fossils, she recognized them as being different from any living creatures, or previously-discovered fossils.) This was an era when the Church of England was still steadfastly sticking to Bishop Ussher’s proclamations that the world was created in 4004 BC. These fossils, and others like them, led British scientists to examine the concepts of evolution and the great geological history of Earth.

A middle-class spinster - Elizabeth Philpot, who was farmed out with two of her sisters to live in Lyme Regis when their brother inherited the family property and married - developed an interest in fish fossils and became Mary’s fossil-hunting partner and her champion to the scientific community. Mary’s talent for discovering specimens in the fossil-rich cliffs and outcroppings along the Lyme Regis beaches drew many scientists and amateurs to her, without attracting the recognition she richly deserved. A number of recent biographies have helped to rectify this lack of acknowledgement.

Chevalier’s novel captures these characters and richly evokes the atmosphere and muted excitement of the fossil beds, and of the town of Lyme Regis. Needless to say this novel would make an interesting movie, as did the author’s Girl With a Pearl Earring.



NOTE: the fossils shown are just a few of my own collection, and not intended to represent Lyme Regis material.

Serendipitous Reading

My “serious” reading is often focused on a topic that intrigues me at a given time – currently I rotate between geology, history of books and reading, cookbooks, and various art and artists. Sometimes I’ll get caught up with a certain author and want to read a string of his or her books – recent candidates have been Simon Winchester, Anthony Bourdain, Anne Tyler, and Bill Bryson.

My “potato chip” reading – the light stuff that I read just before turning out the light for the night – is often from some mystery series and usually depends upon my colleagues supplying me with cartons of mass market paperbacks by certain authors or in certain categories (bibliomysteries being a favorite, of course).

In between is a category difficult to name – usually literary fiction or non-fiction. I guess I would call it “intellectually engaging pleasure reading.” This category is generally filled with books acquired through pure serendipity – inexpensive copies picked up at the flea market or yard sales or however, where the investment of a dollar or two is not going to kill me if I try something new and find I don’t like it. This is often the most fun category, for I find myself reading books that I really love but hadn’t heard about. Because in my business I deal primarily with old and antiquarian books, I don’t keep abreast of best seller lists or even book gossip as I once did when selling new books.


What is somewhat odd about this process, though, is that sometimes these books coalesce around certain subjects, be they fiction or non-fiction, and quite often their relationship is not apparent from their titles or obvious subject matter when I pick them up. A few years ago a number of my “serendipity” reads turned out to relate, in one way or another, to the American Civil War. Not to the battles and warfare itself, but to some of the issues that led to, fed, and resulted from that conflict. So books such as The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, by Jane Smiley; John Bailey’s The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans; a biography of Fred Harvey, and a couple of other random picks at the time surprised me by reflecting some Civil War issues between them.

Of course, if books are published within a short time-span you can understand some similarities – author imaginations are stirred, editorial departments are alert to, reader interest is fueled by, whatever issues are in general discussion or investigation at the time.

So it may not be surprising that several of my recent reads by European authors reflect upon the Second World War and subsequent Cold War years – again, not in terms of warfare and battles but more about the human factor and how lives were affected by these events. So consider these brief reviews:

Markus Zusak: The Book Thief. I had no idea what to expect when I snatched up this one to include in some purchases and bring home, but I was very pleased with it. The protagonist (book thief) is a young girl who is fostered by a couple in a town on the outskirts of Munich during WWII. Although illiterate, Lisle Meminger has arrived with a copy of The Grave Digger’s Handbook that she discovered in the snow where her younger brother, who died on the train trip to their new home, was being buried. Her foster father, a likeable accordion player and professional house painter, undertakes to teach Lisle to read, using the Handbook as her first reader. She subsequently steals a book off a Nazi burn pile, and from the library of the town mayor. The life of her adoptive family is complicated when they hide a Jew in the basement where Lisle has taken her reading lessons. Written in a clear prose style that still sometimes borders on poetry, the most surprising element in this book is the narrator. Zusak is an Australian author whose German mother stimulated his interest in this topic with stories from her personal history.


Jim Powell: The Breaking of Eggs. A debut novel by this British author, this one concerns Feliks Zhukovski, a Polish Jew expatriate who took refuge in Paris during the days of Communist idealism. There he has supported himself by publishing a frequently-revised travel guide to Eastern European countries, and has managed somewhat spectacularly to avoid his own history, his family, and change of all sorts. Sometimes this oblivion is quite amusing, in a similar vein to Anne Tyler’s obtuse travel guide writer in The Accidental Tourist.

Of course, by 1991 when the story takes place, the Berlin Wall is gone and Communism has collapsed. Now in his sixties, Feliks is suddenly forced to confront a half-century of personal history. Along the way he finds a long-lost brother and his family, the real story of what happened to his mother, his own unsuspected legacy, and the fact that his idealism obfuscated truth and reality. It is, in a sense, a “coming of age” novel of the second coming – the elderhood that sums up our lives. Feliks not only survives this exposure, he emerges victorious and a good deal more cosmopolitan.

Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses. This novel takes us to a Norwegian riverside cabin with Trond Sander, a sixty-seven year old man who has retired to reflect on his life and perhaps to test himself in this rustic environment where he must learn to fend for himself, often using skills that his father taught him when he was still a teenager. A novel that unfolds in the mind of the protagonist, part of this story is set in the period of World War II where Trond’s father was clearly a member of the resistance, helping to smuggle political prisoners out of the country; and part is in his present, where shadows of the past become solid flesh and blood. There is a good deal of understated passion in this book, and a certain unsentimental poetry. It’s the kind of story you feel in your bones. And, of course, like the last one it’s a late-life “coming of age” story.

Another synchronicity, and I have to wonder if these books appealed because the characters are similar in age to myself.