Book cover of Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650–1815

Book description

In Puritan New England, with its abiding concern for things not of this world and its distrust of forms and ceremonies, one art flourished: the symbolic art of mortuary monument stonecarvers. This carefully researched, beautifully illustrated work was the first to consider this art in depth as a meaningful aesthetic-spiritual…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Graven Images as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is densely illustrated (I’d guess that about three-quarters of the 430 8”x10” pages of the main text are filled with images). This was what first led me to travel to New England to see these stones for myself, which I did six years later.

This combination of rich art and Puritan values should challenge anyone’s assumptions about early American sensibilities.

If you love Graven Images...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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Book cover of Memorials for Children of Change: The Art of Early New England Stonecarving
Book cover of The Masks of Orthodoxy: Folk Gravestone Carving in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1689-1805
Book cover of Gravestone Chronicles I: Some Eighteenth-Century New England Carvers and Their Work

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