Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality

Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality, Barber, Paul. Published by Yale University Press, 1988. Card covers. 8vo up to 9½" tall., 236pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Sticker to front cover and otherwise, this is a fine, unread, unmarked copy. Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires and offers the first scientific explanation for the origins of the vampire legends. From the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized everyone in the city, to the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires, his book is fascinating reading. "Barber's inquiry into vampires, fact and fiction, is a gem in the literature of debunking… [and] a convincing exercise in mental archeology."—Roy Porter, Nature