If you want to read all about why cemetery ledgers matter, the people keeping metal type making alive, the joys of collecting well-worn books, medieval fragmentology & much more, pick up the fall issue of @finebooks.bsky.social , edited by me! store.finebooksmagazine.com/autumn-2025/...

If you want to lift your spirits by having a drink & perusing excellent zines, the Pete's Mini Zine Fest is tomorrow at Pete's Candy Store hosted by Quimby's! I'll be bringing my zines on cemeteries, manhole covers, spirit photography & more. www.instagram.com/p/DOtlLgVEZx...

Delightful surprise to open a Brooklyn Public Library book & find it was once Pete Hamill’s! (And inscribed to him by Max Gordon of the Village Vanguard.) Love that this is just part of the circulating collection.

I don't think Lee Hays has got his due as compost burial pioneer, with his last wishes for his ashes to be mixed with a compost pile. He even wrote a farewell poem about it: "If I should die before I wake, / All my bone and sinew take: / Put them in the compost pile / To decompose a little while.

I remember getting two pitches from this "author" this year & naively responded to the first until there was a weird question about Paypal payments. But I feel like this is only the tip of what most editors are seeing of AI pitches, it's such a waste of time & burying everything else

#SundayReads: For more than half a millennium, the dance of death in European visual art has imagined a tango between the quick and the dead. @AllisonCMeier explores: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/our-mortal-waltz-the-dance-of-death-across-centuries

Some new reporting by me on the preservation of Black churches

Just want to celebrate that the NYPL Performing Arts Library has an incredible offering of album liner notes that you can examine in their research collections! Saved me a lot of time/money tracking things down.

I've spent much of this year on a Folk Art Museum project rethinking biographies for "outsider" artists & I'm proud these are now coming online! It was inspiring in this time of undervaluing human creativity to commune with those who made their own paths collection.folkartmuseum.org/search/meier

The summer issue of @finebooks.bsky.social I edited is out, with tales of literary Portugal, people who love endpapers, poisonous books, Route 66 maps & more! Get a copy now in beautiful print www.finebooksmagazine.com/issue

Never not a weird time to promote projects these days but I am proud of this brand new Modernist NYC Map I authored for Blue Crow Media! Has over 50 sites for you to wander actoss the five boroughs bluecrowmedia.com/products/mod...

Did some reporting on very old house news

The Matta-Clark roses are now blooming!

This Thursday my online deep dive on cemetery symbols begins! We'll discover the ancient rites, memento mori meaning, and often overlooked art of how we express the afterlife on our graves. Join live or on your own time: www.morbidanatomy.org/classes/p/sp...

Cemetery walk season returns this weekend! I'm leading the spring tree wander at Green-Wood in Brooklyn, hopefully giving time to think about our connections to trees and death www.green-wood.com/event/buds-a...

This Saturday night! I'm leaving my home to co-host a storytelling event at Chinatown Soup as part of the Goblin Market. Please join & bring any tales you would like to share of Uncanny Journeys. My zines will also be among the market's wares from March 21-30 www.eventbrite.com/e/goblin-mar...

If you want to join any of my spring cemetery happenings, in person in Brooklyn and Buffalo to talk trees and grave history, and online to talk symbolism, I have a new newsletter for you mailchi.mp/ab8d89c57e2d...

I love a glimpse of the human hand behind marvels!

Made a zine of my photos of guiding angels in Green-Wood Cemetery, looking at how they depict Victorian women & children at a time when pregnancy was not a choice. Selling them for $20 incl. shipping to give the profits to the Roe Fund of Oklahoma, send a DM or reach out allisoncmeier.com/contact/

I had not heard that Most Holy Trinity with its distinctive metal markers—a choice to make everyone equal in death—has had a major increase of memorials stolen recently, likely destroyed as scrap. Too many NYC cemeteries have little attention to their care outside of volunteers like this stepping in

There's such a density of garbage news that only through my brother in Memphis did I hear of this giant supercomputer that supposedly needs to run polluting gas turbines 24/7 & is offering its community zero transparency www.commercialappeal.com/story/money/...

I reported for @theartnewspaper.bsky.social on the recent identification of a cemetery for enslaved people at Andrew Jackson's plantation, where overgrowth and absence from historic records obscured it from visibility www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/02/14/c...

Beautiful to see a simple kindness for each other

I never get tired of the city snow

Didn't anticipate how timely Woody Guthrie's words would feel when I pitched my book project: "Fascism would like for you to weep and hang your head and cry and get so mixed up in your thinking that you'd walk into one of its own churches looking for some kind of a personal salvation."

This will surely be wonderful to learn research techniques with Bess!

It was standing room only tonight at Roulette for a performance of the Long String Instrument, a drone instrument with 50-foot strings. Much appreciation in this week of dread for seeing people just really excited to witness giant, weird instruments.

Not enough good stuff on the tables of the world! Love this distribution idea

Sometimes I make myself feel bad for spending time on zines as opposed to “real writing” (whatever that means these days) but it’s fun to walk by the wonderful Quimbys in Williamsburg & see my little NYC Epitaphs zine among the cool DIY publications

Finally caught the ‘Imaginary Books’ exhibit at the Grolier Club & the attention to detail in making the books real in their time & place is great. We have an article about this collection of imaginary books in the latest @finebooks.bsky.social: store.finebooksmagazine.com/winter-2025....

The Center for Book Arts has a cool exhibit about “blooks,” or book-shaped objects! From book lighters to marble book memorial objects

Radiant sunset witnessed tonight (as seen in Prospect Park)

Always into a small highly specific publication and this new one on the gravestones of type designers is top notch. (By Gavin Morrison and Scott Myles with Katherine Small Gallery) ksmallgallery.com/blogs/events...

As always, seeing all the people out in Prospect Park after a snowfall raises the spirits

I'm looking for stories for this coming year to share in @finebooks.bsky.social! Timely, engaging articles about book collecting, libraries & other bookish things are all great for the magazine. Rates between $200-600. Info here & reach out with any questions: www.finebooksmagazine.com/writing

It is such a small thing amidst it all, but it makes me deeply sad that when my aunt's home in Altadena was lost today, her well-tended garden that had its peaceful gazebo memorial to my cousin who died far too young is also gone too.

I have a big, beautiful story on Jesse Aaron and how he found faces and figures in wood in the latest issue of Raw Vision magazine! It’s excerpted online with the full version in print rawvision.com/blogs/articl...

No better days to live close to Prospect Park ☃️

I love a story of urban explorers clandestinely retrieving lost museum objects www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/01/06/s...

My very specific thoughts on the year that was & wasn’t!

Hot off the presses, keeping the dream of print alive, it’s another issue I edited of @finebooks.bsky.social! It’s got stories on the writings of medieval women, a library of imaginary books, bookbinders in Cairo, maps as propaganda & much more! www.finebooksmagazine.com/issue/winter...

Did you know that what's likely Gordon Matta-Clark's only surviving public work is a small cage for a rosebush in the East Village? Very happy to report on its revival as my last story for the year www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/12/20/g...

A new issue of the magazine I edit is arriving soon! Subscribe yourself or a friend to read all about book things & celebrate the joy of print www2.finebooksmagazine.com/subscribe/

What a steal to drink one’s coffee with a whiff of terrible ruination

For your weekend plans: I'll be giving a talk on the dance of death at the horror-themed Flying Fox Tavern in Ridgewood on Sunday! It's free, it's a double feature with Xmas ghosts, there are drinks & food! Come on by www.instagram.com/p/DDc_r1OR9q...

One way to build your funeral history museum: "He just goes door-to-door to funeral homes, seeing what they have for sale.” www.ozarksalive.com/stories/sixk...

There's more talk lately of creating more sustainable & biodiverse cemetery landscapes, but what about edible ones? I wrote about how orchards are being planted in a couple of Philadelphia graveyards for American Cemetery magazine www.kates-boylston.com/american-cem...

I've sent a last edition of my sporadic newsletter for the year: Check it out for all my upcoming/current things, from talking the dance of death in one of NYC's top bars to choose-your-own-adventure zines, & a spooky Paris (!) tour you can join further on the horizon mailchi.mp/e53d97d9bb93...

Discovered that the Poetry Project has its entire newsletter archives online, with some great moments in time like this item in January 1973 for Gordon Matta-Clark's "Walls Paper" at $1.50/yard with the artist himself coming to install it for you www.poetryproject.org/publications...