Hi,

I've spent a ton of time lately investigating a famously savage duel that happened over 400 years ago. The resulting book is almost ready, so it's time to show you the cover!

One Thursday night in France, sometime around 1597, a young man climbed out of his mother's château window to go and fight a duel. He was already an accomplished swordsman, and he was wearing a very fine hat, but he did not survive.

The quarrel began with a satirical poem, a mutual enthusiasm for violence, and a grey beaver hat sent as a challenge. It ended with two men dead, another horribly wounded, and the survivor riding away wearing the hat that had started it all.

The story was retold for centuries, and in the process got thoroughly mangled. People who had died somehow survived, details changed, and historians made things up. So I went back to the original sources to find out what actually happened.

The result is The Duel of the Hat: How a Great Story Became Bad History, which includes the story as I think it really happened, an investigation into the people, places, weapons, and events involved, and translations and transcriptions of the most important sources, including one lengthy article that has never been published online in any form (I’ll get it up on my blog soon). Oh, so many footnotes.

The early-access PDF will be available on Monday. I'm inviting readers to help me catch errors, identify confusing passages, and point out anything I've missed before I publish the finished book at the end of November. Everyone who buys the early-access PDF will receive the finished ebook when it's ready, plus a discount voucher for the price of the PDF off whichever print edition they prefer (paperback or hardback). And if you send me feedback and want a name-check, I'll include you in the acknowledgments. Expect an email announcement early next week.

Meanwhile, MS 2031 is now available in paperback.

You can find it here.

The paperback includes all the material from the PDF edition, plus a facsimile of the original manuscript. If you bought the PDF, you should have received an email with a discount code to take the price you paid for it off the paperback.

It's my usual shop policy to include the ebook free with every print order, so this seemed the fairest way to apply that policy retroactively.

In less pleasant news, I've had to suspend the seven-day free trial for Solo Training.

I was getting lots of people signing up for the 7-day free trial of my Solo Training subscription, followed by lots of failed subscription payment notifications. It appears that fraudsters were using the free trial to test stolen credit cards. The trial required a card number, but didn't actually charge anything for the first seven days, which apparently made it attractive for that purpose.

Not quite the kind of training I had in mind.

Solo Training itself is unaffected, but the free trial is off the menu for now. My standard 30-days no-questions-asked money back guarantee remains unaffected.

And finally, the podcast.

Season three of The Sword Guy Podcast is taking longer to organise than I'd hoped. I have four interviews in the bag so far, and want at least eight ready before launching the season. So I doubt we'll get going before the middle of January.

As usual, it's proving especially difficult to find women guests. Very few women ever pitch themselves for the show, so here's an invitation: if you're a woman with something to say about swords, history, martial arts, or anything else my listeners might enjoy, please get in touch. And if you know someone who would make a great guest, please introduce us.

You don't need to be famous, just mad about swords.

cheers,

Guy