Reading’s original rules

We’d call a ‘secondary’ find a reported historical artefact, something that went missing from its own time but re-appears almost at random, decades later. A supporter was musing through the FA News for July 1961, as you do, and was stopped in his tracks by a ‘photostat’ copy of the original 1871 rules of Reading FC. Bizarrely no text explanation was offered as to why this was re-printed here but even a copy was a valuable addition to the record, as the whereabouts of the original have long been unknown. Equally randomly from a scrapbook, Roger came across a secretary-manager’s reminiscences of the 1890s in series of articles he penned for the local paper in the 1920s.