Putting the fun in "Funeral Management And Costs", a 1921 polemic by Quincy Dowd. I can safely say it's a book resistant to general interest, but! A fine subject for a dancing skeleton bookmark. Did I make a book to use two feet of novelty ribbon? Of course I did. (Build in another post.)
I think it's p obvious what's going on here, stylistically. You got some Memphis (particularly Martine Bedin's simple forms with complex texture, I'd say), a bite of irony poisoning, a rather large serving of Haring, and, obvs, the Pac-Man cereal box. You know- the 80s starter pack. But fun like the pre-packaged, pre-digested nostalgia of the 80s that lacks the sticky car seats or cigarette smoke or Reagan.
Got to give it to Reverend Quincy Lamartine Dowd. He's far more a reformist firebrand than his book's title may imply. "Funeral" isn't a how-to so much as a condemnation of the then-modern funerary practices. He wanted municipalized deathcare, cremation, and less extravagant funerals, in that order. Don't forget; this book was written less than five years after the end of WW1 And the Spanish Flu (a carefully unmentioned pall that hangs over the book regardless of its textual absence- sounds familiar). A lot of people were suffering "burdens borne from the grave, placed upon the cradle," to paraphrase the foreword. And, not for nothing, those burdens are even higher, adjusting for inflation, over a century later.
His book is here on the Internet Archive. His cremains were buried in Columbus, Wisconsin, in a modest grave.