Publisher: T. Fisher Unwin, London (1914)
In well preserved condition. 461 pages, with 126 wonderful illustrations. Dark red boards with gilt titles and decorations on front and on spine. The boards and binding are solid and tight save for light shelfwear. The pages are crisp and clean save for foxing on the first and last blank pages; all other pages are crisp and clean. "The book is a veritable anthology of death, the author having gathered together all that is beautiful, romantic, witty, humorous, pessimistic or artistic concerning the end of human life. Peculiarly, the book is not pessimistic in tone, but gives the distinct impression that mankind in mass has ever viewed death philosophically. The book contains thousands of quotations from literature and more than one hundred interesting illustrations." [Amazon Review] In his book, the author makes references to the observations by the 19th and early 20th century sexual psychologist, Havelock Ellis. Included with the book is a signed letter from the author F. Parkes Weber, which is a reply to a correspondence from Havelock Ellis. In the letter, dated August 4th,1917, Weber asks Ellis to accept this very copy to Ellis. "Please accept a copy of the second edition of my book ..." The author makes an interesting observation about his own book by stating, "The Confxxx of the book, however, in reality, has to do with life more than death, and this will be more that case in the new third edition, which I hope will be published some time in 1918. I shall give one or two pages in Havelock Ellis's, "The Modern Seers" which is wonderfully, clearly written." Please see below for more information on Dr. Weber and Henry Havelock Ellis.
Frederick Parkes Weber (8 May 1863 – 2 June 1962) was an English physician who practiced medicine in London. His father, Sir Hermann David Weber (1823–1918) was a personal physician to Queen Victoria. Weber contributed over 200 medical articles and wrote 23 books over a period of 50 years. In 1922, he, along with his wife, published a philosophical medical tome called "Aspects of Death and Correlated Aspects of Life in Art, Epigram, and Poetry". Together with his father, Weber was an avid coin collector; their numismatic collection being donated to several places, such as the Boston Medical Library, the British Museum, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Fitzwilliam College at Cambridge. He was a long-standing member of the Royal Numismatic Society.
Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 – 8 July 1939), was an English physician, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-authored the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis. Ellis was among the pioneering investigators of psychedelic drugs and the author of one of the first written reports to the public about an experience with mescaline, which he conducted on himself in 1896. He supported eugenics and served as president of the Eugenics Society. Ellis studied what today are called transgender phenomena. Together with Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis is considered a major figure in the history of sexology to establish a new category that was separate and distinct from homosexuality. Aware of Hirschfeld's studies of transvestism, but disagreeing with his terminology, in 1913 Ellis proposed the term sexo-aesthetic inversion to describe the phenomenon. In 1920 he coined the term eonism, which he derived from the name of a historical figure, Chevalier d'Eon.... [Wikipedia]
