Book launches and reviews, Spring 2009
Book review
Monument, Memory, and Myth - use and re-use of three bronze age round barrows at Cossington, Leicestershire. John Thomas; Leicester Archaeology Monograph 14.
This monograph gives details of the findings from the excavation of three bronze age barrows at Cossington in Leicestershire and demonstrates the changed use and emphasis of the monuments through the period of construction and later bronze age and into the iron age and Anglo-Saxon periods, each group of people using the barrows as a focus for their own rites, indicating the continuity of memory and/or mythology through many centuries and cultures.
Details of finds are also discussed: these include a fine bronze age composite bead necklace, found lying where it was placed, around the neck of a bronze age woman.
Copies are available from ULAS, University of Leicester, LE1 7RH at £17.00 plus £2.50 postage (cheques to University of Leicester).
Barbara Cast
Book launch
The Centenary Lounge in Keyworth Village Hall was the scene on 29 April 2009 for the launch of the latest book published by that well-known firm of Reflections of a Bygone Age. This publishers books will be known from their Yesterday's Nottinghamshire series of books using old postcards to illustrate how places and people looked in the past.
Brian Lund who, together with his wife Mary, owns this publishing house, is known nationally as a collector of postcards and promoter of postcard fairs as well as being editor of Picture Postcard Monthly, an international magazine devoted to the postcard collector.
The book launched is a hardback, limited edition of 150 numbered copies written by Brian and showing the villages of Keyworth and Plumtree from old postcards and also series of cards produced by Brian over the years. It is a fascinating study, enhanced by historical facts relating to postcards. Did you know that postcards were an Austrian invention of 1869 and that plain postcards were first made available by the British Post Office in 1870 and it was not until 1894 that picture postcards became available in Britain?
Keyworth and Plumtree The Postcard Album is available at £25 from the publisher; tel: 0115-937-4079 and, being a limited edition, is a collectors item. 74 A4 pages and 116 illustrations. ISBN 978 1 905408 20 7.
Howard Fisher