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Creasy Spines

“Every crease is a story.”

Illustration of the kind of find described. We don't reproduce press photographs.
Other· 1580s

An Elizabethan deed falls out of a 1924 Alice in Wonderland

By the Editors · As reported by The Standard (Warrnambool), 10 September 2016

FoundWarrnambool, Australia

Tucked inside Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1924 edition) by Lewis Carroll

In January 2014 a customer at Lorraine Smith’s secondhand bookshop in Warrnambool, Victoria, opened a 1924 edition of Alice in Wonderland and found a folded piece of calfskin vellum. It proved to be a legal document from 1583, from the reign of Elizabeth I, naming the Popeley and Appleyard families of Gildersome in Yorkshire. Smith spent about eighteen months tracing how it reached Australia in 1924, connected it to a local family who had kept it for decades, and wrote a book, Journey of a Lost Manuscript, about the search.

This is our summary of a find reported in the press. For the full story, photographs and any updates, read the original report in The Standard (Warrnambool).

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