This slim volume with a smart, shiny black dust jacket is a collection of over 300 epitaphs from “cemeteries, churchyards, funerary monuments, memorial plaques and historical records”. There is no clear statement of the rationale for choosing the examples used other than the cover blurb: “some of the best and most intriguing examples of the final word”, ranging from Ancient Greece to the twenty-first century. The seven-page introduction provides a useful history of memorials and epitaphs, recording trends and fashions through the ages.
The epitaphs are divided into seven broad categories which the author admits is an attempt to “give some structure to this highly subjective assemblance”. The categories are long life, love and friendship; occupations and professionals; let us now praise famous men and women; elegiac, poignant and plaintive; peculiar, gothic, whimsical and absurd; violent or untimely death; and literary epitaphs. The last are “written while the individual is still alive and generally not intended for actual use”.
There is a good bibliography with particular emphasis on nineteenth-century works and including sources from which some of the collection has been derived. There is also a name index so that the book can be used to check for half-remembered phrases for specific people, but not to find out who said “I told you I was ill” (Terence Alan (Spike) Milligan although the actual inscription appears in Irish Gaelic).
Epitaphs is an attractive small book but more of a whimsical gift than an essential library reference work. A similar volume, Famous Last Words: An Anthology (Cock-Starkey, 2016), is also published by the Bodleian Library with the same format, but this is even less substantial, with quotations arranged only by speaker and no subject categorisation, again not designed as a reference book.
