This book has been written out of an appreciation of history and a wish to preserve for posterity the names of those persons who are, or at one time were, buried in the Old Episcopal Burying Ground in Lexington. Over the years, some 600 burials took place and many of the stones are still there. This is the oldest cemetery still extant in Lexington, and has long been known as Lexington’s Westminster Abbey because of the prominence of those buried there. A brief history of the cemetery, complete with some notable epitaphs, precedes the burial records which are arranged alphabetically by surname, and include birth and death dates, burial notes, comments and source. An essay discussing the cottage in the Old Episcopal Burial Ground and an essay on a collection of early Lexington funeral invitations by Dr. James D. Birchfield follow the records. Four engaging vignettes of Lexington life in the 1830s by Carole Thomas Pettit are based on real people, although their thoughts and motives are conjecture. These fascinating vignettes take the reader to 1833 to witness the cholera epidemic through the eyes of a bricklayer; on a railway journey with a discussion of its impact on the community; to social gatherings at Fowler’s Gardens; and the final vignette offers a glimpse of the life of artist, John Grimes. Several illustrations and a fullname index augment this work.

Lynwood Montell has collected ghost tales all over the state of Kentucky, from coal mining settlements to river landings, from highways to battlefields. He presents these suspense-filled stories just as he first heard or read them: as bona fide personal experiences or as events witnessed by family members or friends. There are over 250 stories in Ghosts across Kentucky that are set in specific places and times. They include tales of graveyards, haunted dormitories, animal ghosts, and vanishing hitchhikers. Montell describes weird lights, unexplained sounds, felt presences, and disappearing apparitions. Phantom workmen, fallen soldiers, young lovers, and executed criminals appear in these pages, along with the living who chance upon them. Though the focus is on the stories themselves, Montell also includes a chapter explaining our fascination with the supernatural and the deep truths these storytelling traditions reveal about our lives and our pasts.

Says the author in his preface to the book: "All too often authentic folklore has been caught up in the backwash of time. Nearly forgotten, it has disappeared into the pages of neglected histories or been all but lost in the retelling of legends. In Kentucky a few ancient ones still remain who know firsthand some of the stories, legends and folklore of our state. With their passing we stand to lose even more of this wonderful heritage. It is time ... time that someone undertakes to collect, at least in part, the scattered remnants and compile them for the present and future generations of Kentuckians."

The story of Lexington's historic cemetery, with a foreward by the late state historian of Kentucky, Thomas D. Clark.

The doyenne of Southern letters has enjoyed an avocation in photography in addition to her vocation of writing. In fact, Welty worked for the WPA in the 1930s and 1940s, traveling around her native Mississippi, documenting the ways of life distinctive to that state. One of the "themes" of those photographs was country churchyards, and 90 of those particular images have now been gathered into this album. Welty's friend and fellow southern fiction writer Elizabeth Spencer supplies a beautiful introduction, in which she connects Welty's interests and sensibilities to what she observed and absorbed as she explored the cemeteries of rural Mississippi. "What seems to speak most plainly to me," Spencer relates, "is Eudora Welty's vision of death as a part of life." And the richly textured black-and-white photographs boldly but also enchantingly remind the viewer of that correlation.

With more than 100 full-color photos and an insightful text, "Kentucky's Last Great Places" highlights the incredible natural beauty found in the Commonwealth's old-growth forests, prairies, wetlands, and other distinctive biological habitats.

"This beautiful book, produced by the Nicolas Hulot Foundation for Nature and Humanity, a group that works to promote education and preservation in the areas of ecology and the environment, is filled with 250 breathtaking photographs taken by a team of renowned nature photographers. After an introduction by Niles Eldredge (curator, American Museum of Natural History), the work is presented in eight sections covering oceans, deserts, grasslands, polar regions, wetlands, mountains, forests, and cities. The introductory narrative for each section, by journalist and French television host Hulot, is minimal, though passionately conservation-minded. The photographs, also minimally captioned, speak volumes on their own—a herd of gnus escaping from crocodiles, a lone beetle crossing the Namib Desert at daybreak—to celebrate nature's majesty and diversity across the globe. The color reproduction is excellent, and the subject matter is consistently dramatic and compelling." (Library Journal)

"'Whether one's career is law, business, publishing or hauling up the flag of revolution, watching, studying and photographing birds are superb ways of keeping one's mind off one's own mortality and staying very much alive.'' Economist-attorney-publisher Cross ( Black Capitalism ) marks 15 years of birdwatching in the High Arctic, the Central Pacific and the Gulf Coast in this appealing collection of some 120 of his color photographs of birds. Snowy egrets with fantastically flexible necks bend them backward to groom themselves; wild-eyed, fiercely tufted reddishsic egrets vigilantly guard their nests. A little tern shelters an even smaller, down-bedecked fledgling on a rocky shore; a fearsomely large snowy owl hovers over its young. Cross evokes a natural world of astounding variety and beauty that teems with seeming personalities, as an open-beaked yellow-billed stork suggests a meddlesome tourist's gawk, lacking only camera and Bermuda shorts." (Publishers Weely)