“Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort” warns an inscription above the entrance to the Paris Catacombs. This Municipal Ossuary is the last resting place of an estimated 6 million people, their skulls and bones transferred en masse in the 18th century from the old city graveyards. Comparable ossuaries, charnel houses, tombs and chapels can be found all over the world. They are the subject of a new book The Empire of Death by art historian Paul Koudounaris, published by Thames & Hudson and lavishly designed by Barnbrook.

While some ossuaries, like the Sedlec Ossuary in Bohemia, are popular tourist attractions, others are virtually unknown and have been photographed by Dr Koudounaris for the first time. His research has taken him all across Europe, and as far afield as Ecuador and Cambodia, and the 250 colour and 50 black & white photographs document the extraordinary beauty and variety of these mortuary displays. The book design looks back to gothic bibles and renaissance title pages, with the typography echoing the dignity and clarity of the ossuaries themselves. What the book presents is not a cabinet of morbid curiosities, but an insight into a way of understanding that seems utterly remote but at the same time eternally relevant.