Bonus cruise post!
One evening, towards the end of our cruise, we arrived a bit too early for dinner. We had about 10 minutes to wait, so we sat down in the library, which was near the dining room. Glancing at the books on the shelves, an idea popped into my head: I told Wendy I would pick a book at random, open it to a random page, and read to her The Most Interesting Excerpt in the World!
I walked over to the shelves. The first book I noticed was a thick book called Birds of the World. I grabbed it, sat down, opened it up, and read what was apparently the most forgettable excerpt in the world. I don't remember what it was at all. Something about habitats, maybe. But the pictures of birds were neat! So we entertained ourselves for a while by flipping through and looking at pictures of birds from around the world. Not a bad way to spend 10 minutes.
When I put the book back on the shelf, the book right next to it caught my eye. It had a weird title: Cranioklepty. The subtitle was Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. On the back cover, the book was described as "An Untold History of Crime & Error" as well as "A Comedy of the Grotesque". That sounded really cool, I thought! So I borrowed the book and started reading it after dinner. It didn't take long before I realized that I loved the book.
It's written by Colin Dickey, and chronicles the rise of the now-debunked sciences of phrenology and craniometry, which proposed that you could discern things like character, personality, and intelligence either from bumps on the skull or from the size of the skull. These ideas became very popular and led to a big demand for skulls. The skulls of criminals were easy to obtain, but the skulls of great artists and philosophers were much more difficult to acquire, which led to a huge increase in grave-robbing.
The history of skulls belonging to composers Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are told in detail. I lost count of how many times their skeletons were buried, dug up, studied, and re-buried. And it was not uncommon for their skulls to disappear or get secretly replaced with someone else's skull each time!
The descriptions of grave-robbing and dealing with corpses were especially macabre. And funny! I couldn't stop laughing at the description of a budding phrenologist who robbed a grave and had his first encounter with the stench of a week-old corpse!
And then there was the story of Beethoven's autopsy, which discovered the composer's brain had deeper, more numerous folds than normal. Dickey writes that this was fitting for Beethoven, because one year Beethoven's brother sent Beethoven a holiday card and signed it "The Landowner". Beethoven sent a reply and signed it "The Brainowner". Ha!
This book was a wonderful discovery. Next up on my reading list is Dickey's latest book, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. From what I've gathered, there's nothing creepy or scary about the book, because it's not really about ghosts. It's about the stories behind the ghost stories in famous haunted houses, and what they reveal about the living. Sounds interesting! And he's currently writing a book about conspiracy theories, which is quite relevant to my interests!