On parting, Scott made a casual remark that he wondered his old friend did not try to get some work from the booksellers, “to keep his types in play” during the intervals of publication of the weekly Mail. Ballantyne replied that such an idea had not occurred to him, and that, moreover, he had little acquaintance with the Edinburgh publishers; but that his types were good, and he thought he could produce work equal to that of any of the town printers. “Scott, with his good-humoured smile, said, ‘You had better try what you can do. You have been praising my little ballads; suppose you print off a dozen copies or so of as many as will make a pamphlet, sufficient to let my Edinburgh acquaintances judge of your skill for themselves.’ Ballantyne assented; and exactly twelve copies of ‘William and Helen,’ ‘The Fire King,’ ‘The Chase,’ and a few other pieces, not all Scott’s own, were thrown off accordingly, with the title (alluding to the long delay in the publication of Lewis’s collection) of ‘An Apology for Tales of Terror, 1799.’”[3] A reproduction of the title is given on the opposite page.
It happened also that Hughes, Ballantyne’s chief workman, had been trained in one of the foremost printing-houses of the time, and was capable of using his materials to the best advantage; and this, joined to James Ballantyne’s excellent taste in the selection of type, contributed to the production of the ballads in a style of typographical perfection worthy of the most eminent printers before him.
In the beginning of 1894 a copy of this very limited edition of the “Apology” was advertised at a moderate price by a bookseller in London. It was immediately purchased by an Edinburgh bookseller, who had a higher opinion of its value than his London brother. This copy bore an inscription in James Ballantyne’s handwriting, of which the following is a slightly reduced facsimile—
Evidently, however, John Murray had given it away some time after, as it shows the further enrichment of the poet Campbell’s book-plate pasted on the title-page. The book is rare, and, till this copy was discovered, the only one known to exist was that at Abbotsford. It consists of seventy-six pages and a title, and from a printer’s point of view deserves the high praise bestowed upon it—having meadows of margin, wide leading, good spacing and colour.
