5 July—Shortly after the Monitor went to press (so to speak) yesterday, we received this link from a particularly attentive reader in the UK to an excellent, delightfully concise piece in The Times, known in the U.S. as The Times of London.

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=f4f9418f-7e77-4345-8ab6-3dc4f6208c55

Here’s the subject of the story, the rare printed copy of the Declaration of Independence recently discovered by chance at the UK’s National Archives. It’s one of the 11 known surviving Exeter Declarations printed in New Hampshire, also known as Exeter Broadsides because of the size of paper they’re printed on, just over 15 x 19 inches. The one in the UK National Archives is the only Exeter Declaration not (currently) in the United States.

The so-called Exeter Declarations were printed in Exeter (where the prep was to open six years later) between 16 and 19 July 1776 by Robert Luist Fowle for his newspaper.

For the record, there are three other copies of the Declaration of Independence at the Kew National Archives in London. They’re the somewhat less rare so-called Dunlap Broadsides, a skosh bigger than the Exeter ones. About 200 of them were printed the night on 4 July 1776 right in Philadelphia by newspaper publisher John Dunlap. Only 26 are known to survive . . .