A complete digitized book · Boston, 1916
Epitaphs of Some Dear Dumb Beasts
An exceptionally personal little book in which Isabel Vallé Austen remembers the dogs, cats, birds and other animals she loved—in affectionate verse and intimate photographs that feel like pages from a family album.
Published
1916
Written at
Geneseo, New York
Edition
The Gorham Press
This copy
Inscribed by I.V.A.
“I love all dogs and other animals … the only pain my pets ever caused me was when they died.”
The complete book · 44 photographed views
Turn every page
The scans have been individually oriented for comfortable reading. They appear in black and white by default; switch on the original colour whenever you want to see the warm paper, pale cloth and marks of use.
Digitized from the Station Antiques copy. Original photographs and page tones are preserved in the colour setting.
A private menagerie in print
Not grand monuments, but small lives remembered
Published under the name Isabel Vallé, the volume is a comic, tender and occasionally sharp-edged roll call of creatures who mattered to her.
Bulldogs and bull terriers sit beside cats, a lamb, a pig, a garden toad, a goldfish, a cricket, a carrier pigeon, a bantam cock and a pet swan. Some verses are unabashedly sentimental; others turn on puns, personality or the absurd circumstances of a death. The photographs keep bringing the reader back to individual animals: Spotty's steady gaze, Scottie's neat pose, Pete's broad stance and the dogs pictured at home with the people who knew them.
In a preface written at Geneseo on September 5, 1915, Isabel called the book a “reminiscent cri du coeur.” Her hope was that it might find an echo with readers to whom animals were, in her words, “real people.” That declaration explains why this slight book feels so intimate more than a century later.
From private affection to a public gift
The woman behind a beloved Chester library
Isabel Vallé Austen was an American poet and the sister of Zoé Vallé Lightfoot, whose Chester home became the Zoé Vallé Memorial Library.
After Zoé's death, Isabel bequeathed the house at 63 Regent Street and its grounds to Chester on two lasting conditions: that it operate as a public library and as a civic centre serving the community. The library was established in 1928 and remains a living part of the village.
Seen beside that gift, Epitaphs of Some Dear Dumb Beasts reveals the same instinct on a smaller scale: preserve what matters, give memory a form, and place it where others can encounter it. Isabel's animals survive in a book; her sister's home survives as a place of reading and community life.
Sources and further reading
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Bibliographic details and quotations are taken from this 1916 copy. The library history is drawn from the Zoé Vallé Memorial Library's own account; Isabel's life dates and Sargent portrait record are from the Smithsonian Institution. Google Books provides an independent bibliographic record of the 1916 Gorham Press edition.