Kickstarter I’m Supporting: Morbid Anatomy Anthology

Memento Mori

Morbid Anatomy is a wonderful blog I like to look at when I’m feeling curious, waxing macabre, too aware of my mortality, grateful to be living in a time of Tylenol (though Wolcott’s Instant Pain Annihilator DOES look like a good time) or keen to see a great organic art collection. It’s painstaking and fascinating, and it takes you places you wouldn’t otherwise go. Which is what a great blog ought to do. You’re gonna dig it, especially you goths and you folks who collect pop surrealism.

Metamorphic Postcard, c.1900

Curator Joanna Ebenstein & editor Colin Dickey are putting together a “lavish book immortalizing in words and images the best of Morbid Anatomy Presents,” the local (Brooklyn) lecture series featuring “rogue scholars, artists, writers, museologists, morticians and scientists”. Ebenstein calls the niche “the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture”. Dickey sums it up as things that are “generally seen as being outside of polite conversation”. Specifically in the book:

Topics covered will include: anthropodermic bibliopegy (ie. books bound in human skin), 19th Century Diableries, collections of preserved human tattoos, death themed 19th century Parisian cabarets, extreme taxidermy, popular wax anatomical models, collecting death, the Anatomical Venus, Santa Muerte and Death in Mexico, Terror Management Theory, l’Inconnue de la Seine, “artist of death” Frederik Ruysch, macabre collections, and much, much more.

Collecting death? Where do I pre-order my copy? The Morbid Anatomy Anthology is a current Kickstarter campaign. $25 gets you a book and a hand-written thank you note. Pledge your support, and find out more here.

I like this quote from Ebenstein:

I think of the Morbid Anatomy series in the context of 18th century ideas of rational amusement or learning for fun’s sake. I feel like all of our presenters are interested in communicating their ideas because they’re so excited about them. It’s learning for the sake of fun.

I LOVE LEARNING FOR THE SAKE OF FUN. Awesome. Oh, and don’t plan on reading this anthology on your “Nook”:

There’s something different when you’re holding an object in your hand, a beautifully crafted object that you can read in bed, that you can put a bookmark in, that you can underline.

Here’s that link to the Kickstarter again.

Morbid Anatomy Library

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