The Resurrectionist Review
The cover of this book is just so awesome
The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black is a combination of two extraordinary books in one beautifully made book that was published in 2013. The first part of the book is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, detailing his childhood spent exhuming corpses with his father, his medical training, traveling with carnivals in nineteenth-century America, and his mysterious disappearance at the end of his life. Most of the story is told through journal entries, newspaper reports, diaries, and letters, making this pseudo-history seem surreal and strangely realistic. I found myself consistently feeling the urge to google some of the information presented in the story. The story does feel a little sparse at times, but it does make Dr. Spencer Black more enigmatic and mysterious.
journal entries, newspaper reports, diaries as well as letters are used in the story telling components in the first part of the book.
The second book is Black’s magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a medical anatomical textbook for mythological beasts—dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus—all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations. You need only look at these images to realize they are the work of a madman. The Resurrectionist tells his story.
newspaper reports and advertisement flyers are so well replicated that you could easly be fooled into thinking that they are real
The start of the second part of the book, is just filled with some incredible artwork and creativity.
I read this book in a single sitting. The first part of the book is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, and it is not a long read, but it is extremely gripping and vivid. The story runs through his childhood and ends abruptly with his disappearance. The first part of the book was good, but the best part of the book is the sketches in the second part. I spent hours looking at all the sketches, lost in my imagination of what could have been. This is what photographers need. We need inspiration to make us see the world differently. We can only shoot what we see, so we should be consistently training our eyes to see differently, and this book does that extremely well. I loved this book for that reason, and I will be returning to the sketches in the future to rekindle my creativity if I am ever stuck in a rut again.
I showed this to a few Chinese friends and they were convinced that this was proof that the Asian dragon is real. I loved looking at all the diagrams in the book.
I have paged through the book a couple of times since I finished it. The sketches are simply haunting in their creativity.
If you are looking for a good read, a book to spark your imagination, I strongly recommend that you give this a try.
A quick page through of the book.
The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black by E.B. Hudspeth
Published 2013 by Quirk Books
ISBN: 978-1594746161
Shaun.