Published by the Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery

Mount Hope Cemetery is a striking outdoor art gallery, with hundreds of thousands of gravestones reflecting 175 years of interpretations concerning memory, sorrow, and grief. The Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery’s newest book commemorates these gravestones in their endless variety and diverse approaches to death.

Within the book’s 134 full-color pages, you’ll discover stunning photographs of monuments in granite, marble, limestone, sandstone, zinc, steel, ceramic clay, wood, and bronze. These raw materials have been fashioned into simple Colonial tablets, soaring Egyptian obelisks, mausoleums that look like Greek temples, ornately carved steles and columns, winged angels, stone figures in flowing robes, flora and fauna of every type, favorite pet dogs, and a cornucopia of Victorian symbols.

The 6- by 9-inch book is printed on fine, heavy, coated paper stock and spiral-bound so that each page can be turned up completely flat. A full-page map of the cemetery notes each gravestone location by section or range number. The text features information about the materials and styles of grave markers from the early 1800s to the present, as well as interesting information about the permanent residents memorialized by the markers. A section of seven pictures shows steps in the creation of a gravestone, and a dictionary of symbols found in Mount Hope Cemetery is included.