Title: Walks in Abney Park. With Life-Photographs ...
Publisher: James Clarke & Co., London
Publication Date: 1883
Binding: Green Cloth
Book Condition: Good
Edition: First Edition.
xi, 174, [2] pages (age toning and occasional old underlining to pages), fold-out illustrated frontispiece (left hand panel torn away and supplied in facsimile) and folding plan of Abney Park. Original brown endpapers. Contemporary owner's printed label to top of half-title page. 13.5 x 19 cm. Original blue cloth with gilt titling and black embossed decoration (some rubbing and bumping, to covers, spine, hinges split, binding still fairly firm). Bevelled edges. Provenance: Miss Grafftey (no other information). Abney Park in Stoke Newington, was opened on May 20th, 1840, as a non-denominational cemetery and an arboretum of 1,000 trees, which was inspired by George Loddiges, a local Hackney nurseryman. It is one of the 'Magnificent Seven' garden cemeteries of London, but fell into disrepair and was abandoned in the 1970s after the cemetery company went into administration, allowing a uniquely wild atmosphere to develop. It’s been said that an unexploded WWII bomb lies buried somewhere within the grounds. There are rumours, too, that the tasty-looking mushrooms you might see there are bursting with arsenic, thanks to the Victorians’ unwholesome custom of embalming their corpses. And that’s before we even start on the ghost stories. In the first 40 years of its existence, 72,000 bodies were buried there. A second edition was in preparation but never published. Uncommon.