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Cranioklepty - Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius

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WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:

“Dickey’s well-vetted account…illuminates the mystery and controversy of a bizarre tradition throughout the ages.” — Publishers Weekly

“Colin Dickey… has served up a fascinating book. Well-researched, clear and concise, this book is full of interesting historical anecdotes.”  — ForeWord Magazine

“…smartly written account….” Maclean’s magazine [Canada]

“It was larceny most ghoulish”— Boston Globe

“Weaving the story’s details among other equally bizarre episodes of renowned craniums gone missing, Dickey fairly considers what motivated graveyard pilferers….Those with a taste for the macabre who may have read Brian Burrell’s Postcards from the Brain Museum (2005) and Russell Shorto’s Descartes’ Bones (2008) will enjoy Dickey’s eccentric tales.” -  Booklist

“Dickey spins these stories with a storyteller’s grace and a historian’s exactitude. Cranioklepty will join those books for popular audiences that delve into the origins of eccentric intellectual lore, whether madness and lexicography (see: The Professor and the Madman) or inventions and visions by depressives, maniacs, and malcontents. Human endeavor is forever inclined to oddity, and with this book, Colin Dickey provides a delightful illumination of one intriguing example of our quixotic pursuits.”— The Brooklyn Rail

“If only we could skip the textbooks and share something that’s all kinds of real world creepy and awesome like Colin Dickey’s Cranioklepty….It’s a very strange story, the kind of science history that all too often gets left off the cultural map. Teens will eat this stuff up, however, and if they happen to be fans of author Paul Collins, then they’re really going to feel lucky.”— Bookslut

“Captivating…Meticulously researched and authentic as hell, it could be mistaken for some particularly warped gothic fiction but for the plentiful footnotes.”— wired.com

“... the strength of the subject makes Cranioklepty fascinating and at times laugh-out-loud funny… well worth reading for anyone who loves strange truths.”— The Onion’s AV Club

“One of my favorite nonfiction books of the year….”—

LargeHeartedBoy.com [David Gutkowski]

“…a deft intellectual history .”— The Second Pass & Black Octavo

“…fantastic book…chockfull of information….”— Author Exposure Book Club

“[An]  entertaining and illuminating book….[Dickey] explores this macabre episode of history armed with formidable research skills and the ability to tell his story with the gusto it deserves.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Colin Dickey does a great job setting the stage….Dickey’s writing gives this book a Jack-the-Ripper feel and lends just a touch of the macabre.  If you’re looking for something Victorian-dark and gently shivery, don’t beat your head against the wall. Look for “Cranioklepty” instead For fans of the odd and strange, or for little-known history lovers, this is a book to head for.”— The Bookworm Sez

“Dickey’s book turns out to be a highly unusual, fascinating and cautionary Halloween choice.”— Cleveland Plain Dealer

“With an engaging writing style, fascinating historical tidbits, and some very cool…pictures, Dickey manages to give the reader a sense of the politics and intrigue behind a very unusual hobby.”— Internet Review of Books

“…like a work by Hieronymus Bosch or Bruegel the Elder—a giant world made of many little pieces, all gathered together inside the same, solid frame.”— KQED.org

“Cranioklepty is a revelatory book for those who think of head-hunting as an activity pursued only by non-European cultures. This story of European head-hunting and its relationship to modern science is a fascinating read with an all-star cast that includes Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn. The admonition to “Keep your head on” has never sounded so bittersweet!”— Dr. Robert Hicks, Director of the Mütter Museum

COLIN DICKEY

CRANIOKLEPTY - GRAVE ROBBING AND THE SEARCH FOR GENIUS

The after-death stories of Franz Joseph Haydn, Ludwig Beethoven, Swedenborg, Sir Thomas Browne and many others have never before been told in such detail and vividness.

Fully illustrated with some surprising images, this is a fascinating and authoritative history of ideas carried along on the guilty pleasures of an anthology of real-after-life gothic tales.

Beginning dramatically with the opening of Haydn’s grave in October 1820, cranioklepty takes us on an extraordinary history of a peculiar kind of obsession. The desire to own the skulls of the famous, for study, for sale, for public (and private) display, seems to be instinctual and irresistible in some people.  The rise of phrenology at the beginning of the 19th century only fed that fascination with the belief that genius leaves its mark on the very shape of the head.

BOOK INFORMATION

$15.95 / $18.95 Can | Non-Fiction Paperback | 6x9 | 320 pages

October 2010

ISBN: 978-1-60953-010-5 | Carton Quantity: 24

EISBN: 978-1-93607-110-4

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READ EXCERPT

And so, due to that most basic tenet of capitalism, the dearth of famous skulls, coupled with increasing demand, made them that much more valuable, and their theft that much more lucrative. In 1809, Carl Rosenbaum had to pay only twenty-five gulden to secure a gravedigger’s help; in 1827 those interested in Beethoven’s head were willing to go as high as 1,000 gulden.

A few rare skulls could be had through legal channels. When the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller’s body was exhumed in 1826 twenty-one years after his death, the Duke Carl August had the skull mounted on a velvet cushion in a glass case and displayed in his library. In order to keep the Duke from being confused with the religiously superstitious or macabre treasure-hunters, much was made of the fact that the skull was to be kept in the library—the proper place for a skull of genius, which could be read phrenologically, almost as if it were another book on the shelf. As a private, special book, it was not for everyone. As the director of the Duke’s library put it, the skull was only to be made available to those “of whom one can be certain that their steps are not governed by curiosity but by a feeling, a knowledge of what that great man achieved for Germany, for Europe, and for the whole civilized world.”

If anyone had that feeling, it was this librarian, no less than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who would become the bedrock on which much of Germanic literature was based. Either way, after a year the Duke got nervous about the skull and ordered it reinterred with the body. Respectable sources simply could not be relied on; if you wanted a skull, you had to steal it yourself.

THE AUTHOR

Colin Dickey

Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, Cabinet, TriQuarterly, and The Santa Monica Review. He is also co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in Los Angeles.  Author photo by Seth Sherwood.

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