Old Ballads I had quite the find at Afterwords today: "A Book of Old Ballads", a thick tome pubished in 1934. It has 41 poems from several centuries of England and Scotland, with color plates and ink header and footer drawings by H. M. Brock, ragged-edge hand-cut pages, and an earnest foreword by Beverley Nichols deploring the state of postwar poetry in Britain. It's not in very good shape, and rather fragile, so I was delighted to find an illustrated electronic copy on Gutenberg - someone else has done any scanning I was thinking of doing, and I can read it without risking loosening the pages. It's a lovely book, though, and I hadn't heard of most of the ballads herein. I have good intentions, as I go through it, of making a list of the meters of each ballad, the number of verses, and the style of the pieces themselves, be it hopelessly ancient with unknown words, merely with antique spelling, or modern (as it was then) - the idea being to make them easier to study in order to sing them. (Also, a glossary for some of those very old words might not go astray!) I may never get around to learning any of these - some of them are over sixty stanzas! - but you never know. They're certainly the kind of thing I like listening to.