Thank you so much for sharing this!!

Yes, I think so too - lots of early allusions and imitations.

Number 27 made me laugh. It may not have made a novel but it is now a highly successful piece of microfiction.

For older Brits, that it devalues their own old degrees, for sure. Also that grades do create a social hierarchy, but the wrong one - their constant complaint is that degree results don’t just reproduce a level results (in which posher kids have always had an edge) and are hence meaningless.

Yes indeed! And it’s a mysterious one! The title looks like it should be “gettable” - someone someday is going to work out exactly what it was about - but no-one has yet. lostplays.folger.edu/Spanish_Maze...

Go, and return an old Franciscan frier?

Special mention for Matt Woodcock’s book on Fairy in The Faerie Queene, with its sublime subtitle, Renaissance Elf-Fashioning.

Wow! That work sounds amazing! Will check out the paper you mention.

Not a scooby! But there’s a book in the BL that’s of interest to me that presents the same problem. Is there a non-invasive way of getting at these if one were really minded? Can one x-ray them or similar?

But I love even more the image of him in a frock coat, sat on the sideines at the Royal Toxophilite Society, turning the pages of this book while arrows hiss and thwack into the targets.

I love that this thing, after thirty years, can suddenly take you somewhere completely unexpected, to the worlds of Charles Dickens and Buffalo Bill. It’s great that you can read some of Zouch Troughton’s writing and hear some of his voice.

What’s more – this obit explains precisely why Haines gave him the book that’s now on my shelf.

The key is another obituary from 1889, this one from The Archer’s Register:

But then – double plot twist – the obituary is wrong. Gosse says he didn’t know Zouch at all, only his work, but has seen a death notice for him. Actually the notice was for Zouch’s grandfather, also called Zouch. I am more relieved by this than I should be.

But then after some hours of getting to know my new friend Zouch, I found an obituary, written by Edmund Gosse, which indicated that he had actually been dead for ten years at the point this inscription was written. www.google.co.uk/books/editio...

He collected Renaissance art; he was even, briefly, a correspondent of Dickens (!) dickensletters.com/letters/rich....

Google will quickly tell you a lot about a Zouch Troughton. He wrote a blank-verse tragedy, Nina Sforza (1841), acted by Helena Faucit (!), well regarded in print and on stage, and staged in 1893 by Buffalo Bill (!) as a vehicle for his girlfriend (It bombed that time).

A. R. Haines’s name is a bit too common – suggestions welcome. But who on earth is Zouch Troughton? And why did Haines think he would be interested in Roger Ascham’s treatise about archery?

Thirty years and many house moves on, you find it again and start to wonder - who are these people who have been on the front endpapers all this time?