"Going Out In Style: The Architecture Of Eternity"

With books such as "Stories In Stone: A Field Guide To Cemetery Symbolism And Iconography" and "Forever L.A.: A Field Guide To Los Angeles Area Cemeteries And Their Residents," Chico writer-photographer Douglas Keister has unearthed extraordinary tales of the dearly departed. His interest in funerary art began with a ground-breaking collaboration with Xavier Cronin, an editor at American Cemetery magazine, in a book first published in 1997.

A new edition is now available. "Going Out In Style: The Architecture Of Eternity" ($24.95 in hardcover from Echo Point Books & Media, echopointbooks.com) features an introduction by Cronin and hundreds of Keister's full-color photographs and captivating captions. As a blurb notes, "mausoleums, statues, and memorials are a connection between the modern world and the generations that went before us."

"The word mausoleum," Cronin writes, "is derived from the name Mausolus, king of Halicarnassus, a great harbor city in the kingdom of Caria in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), whose tomb was a huge fortress build in 353 B.C. by Mausolus's wife Artemisia (who happened also to be his sister)." Some years later, in 1831, "the rise of the American mausoleum begins with our first 'rural' cemetery--Mount Auburn, just down the street from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

Keister's chapters focus on architectural styles, what's inside the tombs, the depiction of humans in the cemetery, public buildings in the cemetery, and creative funerary arts (such as the Cogswell Monument in Oakland, a "70-foot granite obelisk crowned with a 10-inch rose crystal star and surrounded by curious carved stone sculptures" depicting Faith, Hope, Charity, and Temperance; dentist Henry Daniel Cogswell, who died in 1900, "was an ardent foe of demon rum").

Inside the Blocher Monument at Forest Lawn Cemetery in New York one can find a statue of Nelson Blocher, who passed away in 1884, "resting peacefully on his back," carved from "gleaming white Carrara marble." It's said Blocher died of a broken heart when his philanthropist father fired Blocher's true love, a maid who worked for ol' dad, who, "perhaps motivated by guilt," honored Blocher "with this eccentric memorial."

Who better to bring these stories to light than Keister, Chico's premier "crypt-ographer"?