In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many mechanics in England worked for a shilling a day; their chief food was rye, barley and oats; and one-fifth of the people were paupers. Teachers taught their scholars principally by means of the lash, masters beat their servants and husbands their wives. Superstition was strong and children and grown folks were frightened with lugubrious tales into being “good.” This spirit is especially noticeable in the chap-books that were sold during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A title to one of these chap-books (dated 1721) reads:
A Timely Warning to Rash and Disobedient Children; being a strange and wonderful Relation of a young Gentleman in the Parish of Stepheny in the Suburbs of London, that sold himself to the Devil for twelve years to have the Power to be revenged on his Father and Mother, and how his Time being expired, he lay in a sad and deplorable Condition to the Amazement of all Spectators.
THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE LONDON “TIMES” UNDER THAT TITLE. 1788
The heading mentions that logotypes were used in the composition of this newspaper
Children in those days were either devilishly bad or ridiculously good. Read this title-page:
The Children’s Example; shewing how one Mrs. Johnson’s Child of Barnet was tempted by the Devil to forsake God and follow the Ways of other Wicked Children, who us’d to Swear, tell lies, and disobey their Parents; How this pretty innocent Child resisting Satan, was Comforted by an Angel from Heaven who warned her of her approaching Death; Together with her dying Speeches desiring young Children not to forsake God, lest Satan should gain a Power over them.
FIRST EDITION OF “PILGRIM’S PROGRESS”
Title-page (actual size) of Bunyan’s well-known book, London, 1678
Jack the Giant Killer, the hero of our childhood days, was a favorite subject for chap-book exploitation. There is shown on the following page the title of such a “history.”
Chap-books are poor representatives of the art of typography in Colonial days because they were to the book industry then what reprint books are to the trade in our time. Today it is customary for some publishing houses to buy up old electrotype plates of obsolete editions of dictionaries and other popular books. The plates having already been put to extensive use, are battered and worn, and impressions from them cannot be accepted as criterions for determining the quality of modern printing. Neither are the chap-books true printing representatives of their times. The woodcuts, crudely drawn in the first place, were also worn and battered by repeated use.