The Morthouse

This reminds me of that amazing child-funeral scene in Barry Lyndon, with plumed sheep pulling the hearse.

From Smithsonian Libraries: Illustrated Catalogue of Undertakers’ Hardware and Trimmings with separate price list. James M. Shanahan, New York City, 1869.

Via this board by Trini Wenninger on Pinterest.

Lovely: A visit to Yosemite Cemetery by rare book librarian Megan Curran, over on The Order of the Good Death.

By far the most beautiful grave in Yosemite Cemetery belongs to another teenager who succumbed to a fall. Effie Maud Crippen was aged “14 years 7 mos 22 days” according to her tombstone, when “she faltered by the wayside and the angels took her home.”

From Morbid Anatomy: A coin-operated automaton, likely from the 1920s, of a mortuary, complete with corpses on tables, busy morticians, and mourners bobbing their heads. Click through to see more pictures.

Image source: Skinner Auctioneers, via Morbid Anatomy.

From J.W. Buel’s 1889 book Sea and Land, via io9.

Note: My favorite from the set was “CRAB LIFTING A GOAT,” but since it didn’t involve a human, I didn’t post it.

Via The Atlantic:

New York Police Department Evidence photo. Homicide victim - overhead view, ca. 1916-1920. At the corners, note the legs of the tripod supporting the camera above the body. (Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives)

Via The Atlantic:

New York Police Department evidence photo, homicide scene. Jos Kellner, 404 East 54th Street, murdered in hallway, on January 7, 1916. (Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives) 

Leipzig Suicides. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White, 1945. Source: LIFE Photo Archive, hosted by Google.

Leipzig City Council deputy mayor Dr. Lisso, member of Nazi party since 1932, lying dead while seated at his Town Hall desk, a suicide from cyanide, along with his wife and daughter, as American soldiers enter the city at the end of WWII.

Titanic Links

I’m sure the Internet has mercilessly pounded this information into your skull the last week or so, but yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

Here are a few articles and radio stories that have popped up:

• The New York Times article “Experts Split on Possibility of Remains at Titanic Site” examines the open question, Are there any bodies in there?: “‘I would not be surprised if highly preserved bodies were found in the engine room,’ [Robert Ballard, one of the discoverers of the Titanic wreck] said. ‘That was deep inside the ship.’ Asked how many bodies the broken hull of the Titanic might hold, Dr. Ballard replied: ‘Dozens. Hundreds starts to feel uncomfortable. I know that lots landed on the bottom, because there are so many shoes.’”
• Which leads me to this nice little piece by Robert Krulwich: “The Strange Persistence of Shoes at Sea.”
• “Remembering the Titanic’s Intrepid Bandleader” (NPR) profiles the dapper Wallace Hartley, leader of the doomed eight-member band that continued to play as the ship sank.
• “Why Didn’t Passengers Panic on the Titanic?” (from NPR’s Planet Money crew) looks at how the length of time it took the ship to sink resulted in the preservation of social norms: “Given time, societal conventions can trump our natural self-interest. A hundred years ago, women and children always went first. Men were stoic. On the Titanic, there was enough time for these norms to assert themselves.”
• “Remembering Titanic: Where the Passengers Are Buried,” on the Times’ City Room blog features the following two sentences: “Ms. Olsen said that for many people whose friends died on the Titanic, the grief was lasting. Across from the Straus mausoleum is a monument built by an heiress to a laxative fortune.”

Carl Mydans: Two Russian infantrymen frozen to death in their foxhole. Finland, 1940. Source: LIFE Photo Archive, hosted by Google.

Hughes Mortuary Neon Sign by Ballyhooligan on Flickr.

A nice 1940s winter family photograph in front of the neon sign of Hughes Mortuary

Black teddy bear from England, ca. 1910. From the V&A Museum:

This teddy bear’s name is Blackie, for obvious reasons. It is an early English bear and may have been made to commemorate the death of Edward VII. Black is not a very common colour for teddy bears and is usually associated with a tragic event.

Today’s Links

Thought I’d start doing link-roundup posts somewhere on the spectrum between occasional and frequent. This is the kind of stuff I already post on Facebook and Twitter, so if you like this sort of thing, consider liking and/or following me over theres.

Here you go:

• Summer was the most dangerous time for Tudors (BBC News): Fun ways to die in Tudor England! Best sentence: “Dr Gunn’s previous study highlighted a number of strange ways that people died, in accidents involving archery, dancing bears and early handguns.”
• Police plea on macabre book find (BBC News): A 300-year-old ledger bound in human skin, found in the middle of a road in Leeds. “In the 18th and 19th Centuries it was common to bind accounts of murder trials in the killer’s skin —known as anthropodermic bibliopegy.”
• NPR did a story on what can happen to our Facebook and Flickr accounts when we go to the Big Cloud in the Sky.
• If you aren’t already following Caitlin Doughty on Twitter or Facebook, you should be.

Toothpick (possibly from England), ca. 1620, in the V&A Museum, London:

This toothpick is in the form of an enamelled gold arm that holds a curved sickle for picking teeth. At the other end it has a death’s-head finial (the decorative knob). Elaborately decorated toothpicks had a long tradition. In the Middle Ages they were often made from the claws of birds, especially the bittern, a long-legged water bird.

The toothpick shows an ingenious use of the popular contemporary imagery of death: the arm is surmounted by a skull and holds the sickle of Father Time. Once again the message is ‘Remember you must die’.