While I was writing away, my course for Saturday filled up and there is overflow. It is for late primary schol kids and is super short and is about writing "wizards". Hence hte popularity. I am going to have a ball and they are going to have a ball and all my papers and books were prepared before I left, so I am very glad it is happening. The other thing that happened while I was away was a lot of bills. I am so happy I have money to pay for them :).

Is everyone entirely sick of the introduction thing? The reason I ask is that I just got about 100 historical chapbooks (well, 100 edited into 2 volumes) in the mail. They show what happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the sorts of stories I love. I can talk introductions, I can just get excited about what happened to Medieval themes in the eighteenth century. I am happy to let my excitement flow over into the blog, or to nurse it to myself. Let me know if you want my thoughts. They are not deep and meaningful, but the texts are awesomely fun.

A lot of the time we tend to assume that periods for high literature equals the reality for everyone else, and chapbooks show us a more complex reality. i have loved them for so many years.

One of my new books has a diagram of how they were printed on one sheet (for those that were printed on one sheet, which was many) and then folded and cut. I am going to design a mini one, to see how it worked (when I teach manuscript stuff I force my students to fold quires, so this is playing fair). If anyone is interested (and if anyone can pdf it for me when the two pages are done, so they work and so they print back to back the right way up etc) I am happy to share the joy. It can be actual text from chapbooks, or recipes, or mottos. I vote for recipes. In fact, I vote for the recipes we have all been sharing on this blog recently.