Cemeteries

by Keith Eggener

W. W. Norton and Company, 320 pages, ISBN-10: 0393731693 ISBN-13: 978-0393731699; 2010, list price $75

Reviewed by Davyd Foard Hood

In recent years the Center for Architecture, Design and Engineering and the Publishing Office of the Library of Congress have joined with W. W. Norton & Company to publish seven volumes in a series entitled the Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks in Architecture, Design and Engineering. These books are intended to serve as thematic introductions to the rich holdings of the Library of Congress and provide a valuable representative sampling of the images it houses in the form of books, photographic collections, maps, manuscripts, and other documents. Past titles in the series include Barns, Lighthouses, Theaters, and Public Markets.

In December 2010 the partnership published Cemeteries. Written by Keith Eggener, Cemeteries contains over 600 archival photographs reflecting the extraordinary diversity of burial places and practices in the United States, the wide range of gravestone, memorial, and monument design, and the richness of plot enclosures, fencing, furnishings, and mortuary architecture seen in American cemeteries from the colonial period into recent years. This spectrum includes military cemeteries and the rich iconography of their memorials with particularly good coverage of Arlington National Cemetery. Separate chapters, including "The Rural Cemetery Movement" address cemetery design and landscape treatments. Except for the many images of Arlington National Cemetery, and the photographs appearing in "Tombs of U. S. Presidents," of the graves of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Tyler (both in Hollywood Cemetery), Andrew Jackson, and James Knox Polk, representation of Southern cemeteries is relatively thin. The most notable is the series of sixteen handsome photographs of cast-iron fences, gates, and plot enclosures in Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile, Alabama shot in 1936 by E. W. Russell. They reflect the patterns of fencing erected in cemeteries throughout the antebellum South.