I really wanted to buy the rights to this book for my office, but the bitches at Hesperus Press never wrote back to me. Here is the catalog synopsis of Premature Burial: How It May Be Prevented by Walter Hadwen, William Tebb and Edward Perry Vollum, which I guarantee would have sold fantastically at Urban Outfitters:
“Terrified of being buried alive? This spine-chilling VIctorian volume retells unnerving stories of live burials and narrow escapes.
Long out of print, this book was written to reassure the many nineteenth-century people who were apparently worried (to death?) about being buried alive. Indeed, one of the authors himself had a narrow escape, as his collaborator writes: ‘Dr. Vollum first became interested in the important question of Premature Burial in consequence of his own very narrow escape from live sepulture, having been pronounced dead from drowning, and prepared for interment, when consciousness happily returned spontaneously.’
This edited version of the book extracts the most frightening stories of narrow escapes and living burials from a mass of historical material. Its contents list includes: Animal and So-called Human Hibernation, Narrow Escapes from Premature Burial, Premature Burial of Doubtful Cases, Death-Counterfeits, The Danger of Hasty Burials, Sudden Death, Embalming and Dissections and Count Karnice-Karnicki’s Intervention.
From the preface: ‘The danger, as I have attempted to show, is very real –– to ourselves, to those most dear to us, and to the community in general, and it should be a subject of very anxious concern how this danger may be minimised or altogether prevented.'”
*Dispatch from the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport
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