… is now up on Patahistory, and it is a whopper. Not sure if there are record number of links, but it sure looks like it.

Some of the highlights include the collections of MUSTS for historical fiction set in the Victorian era – if you’ve read any Anne Perry you’ll realise just how true it is; some great Women’s History Month posts, and much more…

P.S. Do check out the booklist for Christian homeschoolers … showing just what a huge industry this is.

Thirty days hath November
April June and September
Of eight-and-twenty is but one
And all the remnant thirty one.

The oldest known version of this is in a 15th-century manuscript, and I still recite a slightly modernised version to myself when trying to sort the 30s from the 31s.

It is a powerful demonstration of why so much early modern “technical information” is put in verse – while oral transmission and memory remains important, even if the material is also being committed to print, and other media – Thomas Tusser, author of a phenomenally successful book of housewifery, recommends that the “comely decked guest-room” be decorated with painted verses, such as:

“The sloven and the careless man, the roinish [scabby] nothing nice,
To lodge in chamber comely decked, are seldome suffered twice.”

A cobbler too, was expected to be able to readily “reckon up his tools in rhyme” – surely a good way of checking nothing was missing.

(From Jones, M. “Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Popular Verse 1480-1650”, in Hattaway (ed) A Companion to English Reniassance Literature and Culture, Blackwell, 2000 p. 457. This is a mammoth tome, but has some really excellent stuff in it. I’m using it to try to ensure I haven’t missed anything important in various projects relating to the period.)

Should you happen to have a spare £3.5m or so, an extraordinarily rare Shakespeare First Folio is being auctioned on July 13.

Printed in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the folio was assembled and edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors who performed with Shakespeare in the King’s Men, the company for which he wrote. The folio contains 36 plays, 18 of which – including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It – had never been printed before and, were it not for their appearance in the folio, would most probably have been lost forever. On its publication, the folio sold for around 20 shillings (equivalent to approximately £100 today).

Coincidentally, I’ve recently been reading about the edition in the small but astonishingly informative pamphlet that accompanied the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition in 1991. (P.W. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare, Folger Library, Washington, 1991.)

There are about 240 surviving copies (the “about” is because in the 19th century collectors and booksellers gathered together fragments – sometimes from different editions). Half of them are held by the Folger, and they have been studied in truly exhaustive detail, to the point where the number of typesettersrs, and the pages they prepared, have been convincingly identified.

The one being sold in the summer is one of only two in the original binding to be held in private hands. One of the “public” original versions has quite a tale. Under an agreement of 1611, it was donated to Sir Thomas Bodley’s library in Oxford, one of a batch of books sent to the University’s binder on 17 Feb 1624. It was sold by the library as a duplicate(!) in the 1660s, but luckily bought back in 1905, when the price was no doubt considerably lower than it would be today.

Should the budget in July not quite stretch to £3.5 million, you can view an online version.