A little thread for #WorldBookDay. A year ago, as the Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv, I took down a book I hadn't read for almost thirty years. 1/ The Miracle Game, by Czech writer Josef Skvorecky (pronounced SHKFO-rets-kee), deals with an apparent miracle in a Bohemian church as the Communists take power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. 2/

"A remarkable and very readable volume."--Daily Telegraph. That's one item in the very eclectic 1874 list of @ChattoBooks, then a new name in publishing. Andrew Chatto had bought the firm of his old boss John Camden Hotten from Hotten's widow the previous year. 2/

An Advent Calendar of Carol Books, no. 27. There's really only one way to end the Advent Calendar, with possibly the most famous carol book of all, celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. This is a copy of the original Carols for Choirs, from when there was only one. 1/ David Willcocks (1919-2015) had become Director of Music at King's College Cambridge in 1957, and had enlivened its famous carol service with descant arrangements for O Come All Ye Faithful and Hark the Herald, plus a new harmonization of Away in a Manger "for the children" 2/

An Advent Calendar of Carol Books, no. 26. Happy birthday to a carol book which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year! No, not THAT one (though we will come to it in due course), but this one, the University Carol Book, first published in 1961. 1/ The University Carol Book is really two books. The first began in the 1920s as a series of pamphlets edited by Edgar Pettman, another busy carol-monger best remembered for introducing Basque carols like "Gabriel's Message" to the repertory. 2/

An Advent Calendar of Carol Books, no. 25. My battered copy of "The Treasury of Christmas Music", published in 1950, was once in Surrey County Library. I first encountered this collection in Warwick Library, which at the time would loan out sets of music to local choirs. 1/ I was after a collection of simple arrangements of the standard hymns and carols for the little village choir I conducted, and the Treasury seemed to fit the bill. Its editor, Will Reed, had a knack for straightforward but characterful harmonisations of traditional material. 2/

An Advent Calendar of Carol Books, no. 23. No-one has ever asked me what my favourite carol book is, but if anyone did, I would answer "The Oxford Book of Carols", published in 1928 and edited by the dream team of Percy Dearmer, Martin Shaw and Ralph Vaughan Williams. 1/ Dearmer and Shaw had already collaborated on the English Carol Book (see no. 21) and Vaughan Williams had laboured at the coal face, collecting songs and carols around the country. The trio had worked together on the hymn book "Songs of Praise", once ubiquitous in schools. 2/

An Advent Calendar of Carol Books, no. 16. In 1868 Novello's issued a little brochure of twenty carols under the title of "Christmas Carols New and Old". The editors were H.R. Bramley and John Stainer, at that time both members of Magdalen College Oxford. 1/ A second series appeared in 1870, and a collected edition the following year, lavishly bound and provided with very Victorian illustrations engraved by the Dalziel brothers, the leading wood-engravers of the day. 2/

An Advent Calendar of Carol Books, no. 13. This rather mouse-nibbled object is a recent and prized addition to my collection, the second and most important of the carol anthologies by E.F. Rimbault, collector of carols, bogus academic qualifications and other people’s books. 1/ “A Collection of Old Christmas Carols” was first printed in 1863, though I think my copy is a later printing; there is an inscription dated 1883 inside, and the plates are distinctly worn. 3/

An Advent Calendar of Christmas Carols, no. 12. This little book is "A Garland of Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern" (1861), edited by Joshua Sylvester. But who was Joshua Sylvester? 1/ The name is taken from a now-forgotten poet and translator of the early seventeenth century, who had a brief period of success at the court of James I. All the nineteenth-century Joshua Sylvester tells us about himself is that he had had a long residence abroad. 2/

An Advent Calendar of Carol Books, no. 9. In 1853 appeared the first important anthology designed explicitly for church use – Carols for Christmas-Tide, edited by J.M. Neale and Thomas Helmore. 1/ John Mason Neale is the first of a long line of (mostly) High Church clergymen who sought to bring the carol into regular use in the Church. (image copyright National Portrait Gallery: npg.org.uk/collections/se…) 2/

An Advent Calendar of Carol Books, no. 4. William Sandys (1792- 1874) is so often coupled with Davies Gilbert in carol literature that you might be forgiven for thinking that "Gilbert and Sandys" worked together like Gilbert and Sullivan. 1/ Even the @odnb falls into this trap, claiming in its article on Gilbert that he "collaborated with William Sandys on a collection of Cornish ballad carols". doi.org/10.1093/ref:od…. In fact, Sandys' work on carols was quite separate from Gilbert's. 2/

An Advent Calendar of Carol Books, no. 2. Perhaps the most popular form in which the carol was transmitted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was the broadside, like this rather ragged example found in a drawer in @theUL earlier this year. 1/ @theUL Broadsides were single-sheet publications printed on one side only. Like chapbooks, they were ephemeral productions generally sold in the street. The form is particularly associated with the popular ballad, but many ballad printers also ran off a carol or two at Christmas. 2/