Someone raised the question the other day as to why pocket-handkerchiefs are always square. Pocket handkerchiefs are not always square – at least they have been square only since Louis XVI decreed that all handkerchiefs should be of a length equal to their breadth. There is a portrait in the Louvre of the time of Henry IV in which a Parisienne is holding a hexagonal pocket-handkerchief. It was the manufacturers who induced the King to decree the
The history of the handkerchief – archive, 1923
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How my heart sings 