The Carnival of Death; or the modern dance and other amusements

Printed wraps, 8vo, 63pp. Very Good with small chips to the upper corners of the cover, mild toning and creasing, subtle splotching to the lower cover; overall neat and crisp. Distributed by The Book Stall, New York, with their ads on the rear wrap; later produced under their imprint. A wild condemnation of dancing and indictment of women's bodies as vehicles for damnation, threatening to turn every man to path of Satan by existing in public. With a weird halftone portrait of the evangelist taking off his coat (a God-sanctioned strip tease?)

Plenty of funny observations, like, "get a girl in love and you may as well try and blow old Gibralter down with a bean-blower," but any folksy charm is eclipsed by the vitriolic misogyny. "You say dancing makes my daughter graceful. Thank God some mothers would rather their children wabble like a hippopotamus than to have their girls risk their honor upon a dance floor to learn gracefulness. You say it makes you graceful. The grace of an harlot or libertine is not the most desirable possession in the world." (47)

Dancing, he says, arouses a "repulsiveness... an indefinable something we call womanhood." By dancing, her "womanhood" becomes desensitized and makes her undesirable. "Say, young woman, when you have destroyed that priceless gem what have you left? It's that undefinable something in you that a true young man marries you for, and when that's gone, if you can get a man to marry you, mark my words he'll marry you because of lust and not love" (51-52).