During my browse through that “Alphabet of History” I also spotted the really cool Natural History of Shakespeare. This is not a book *about* Shakespeare, per se – this is a collection of quotes from Shakespeare’s work, organized by what bits of nature he mentioned:
A pretty neat way to flip through the works if you’re looking for something specific. I love this old public domain stuff, and which I had reference books like this on my shelf at times. I suppose they exist in various forms now, and I could go create a library of this stuff, but the 100yr old ones have a sort of simplicity to them that I really like. I think that we’ve gone a bit off the scholarly deep end in more modern editions. 100 years ago they’re written as if they’re saying, “Anyone at all might have an interest in this stuff.” Now they’re written like, “Ok, you’ll only want this if you’re already a Shakespeare scholar.”
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