Life and Death Masks: Strangeness You Know Nowt Of

One of the rarest and perhaps most curious of books is Portraits in Plaster by Laurence Hutton. Apparently Hutton spent his idle hours collecting life and death masks of the illustrious and then had the collection photographed and published as a book. A hot seller, no doubt. There's an interesting article in the latest edition of The Believer which I have not read in its entirety but the photographs alone were enough to send me Googling. Princeton University has inherited Hutton's collection and if you're curious, and admit ... you are curious, you can peruse the Hutton collection online.