The name of Mr. Eyton is identified with copies of books printed on vellum or on some special paper, not unfrequently for his own use or pleasure; and this gentleman's catalogue is serviceable to such as desire to follow his precedent, of which the modern Edition de Luxe is an outgrowth. Eyton would have proved an invaluable friend to Japanese vellum, had he belonged to a later decade of the century.
The Chap-Book, which dates from the reign of Elizabeth, and was sold for a silver penny of her Highness, becomes less rare under the Stuarts, and common to excess at a later period down to our own days. A large proportion of this species of literature consists of abridgments of larger works or of new versions on a scale suited to the penny History and Garland. Pepys was rather smitten with those which appeared in and about his own time, and at Magdalen, Cambridge, with the rest of his library, a considerable number of them is bound up in volumes, lettered Penny Merriments and Penny Godlinesses respectively. The Huth Collection possesses many which were formerly in the Heber and Daniel libraries. All these productions share the common attributes of very coarse paper, very rough cuts, and very poor type. They are interesting as eminently folk-books—books printed for the multitude, and now, especially when the article happens to be of unusual importance and rarity, worth several times their weight in gold. Two catalogues of Chap-Books and Popular Histories were edited by Mr. Halliwell for the Percy Society in 1848-49.
In the present writer's bibliographical works, to which there is a General Index, will be found an account of all that have come into the market between 1866 and 1892. Thousands upon thousands have unquestionably perished.
The most fascinating member of the Chap-Book series is undoubtedly the Garland—not so much a volume by a given author, such as the Court of Venus (1558) and Deloney's Garland of Good Will, 1596, as a miscellany by sundry hands. The next earliest of these collections known to us at present are the Muses' Garland, 1603, and Love's Garland, 1624. Those in Pepys's library at Cambridge are of much later date, yet of some no duplicates can be quoted, so vast has been the destruction of these ephemerides. Of the Pepysian Garlands a certain proportion are reprints of older editions or repositories of songs and ballads belonging to an anterior date, and here and there we meet with lyrics extracted from contemporary dramatic performances.
Besides Pepys, Narcissus Luttrell the Diarist displayed a taste for fugitive and popular publications, and the copies acquired by him eventually found their way, for the most part, into Heber's hands, whence they have drifted in large measure either into the British Museum or the Miller and Huth collections. Numerous unique examples of the popular literature of his own day, again, are preserved among Robert Burton's books in the Bodleian.
Allied to the chap-book are the broadsides of various classes, including the Ballad, popular and political, the Advertisement and the Proclamation. So far as we know, the second division exhibits the most ancient specimen in our own literature, and is a notification on a single leaf by Caxton respecting Picas of Salisbury use. This precious relic, of which only two copies are recorded, appeared about 1480. It must have been soon after the introduction of printing into London and Westminster that resort was had to the press for making public at all events matters of leading importance; but we do not seem to possess any actual evidence of the issue of such documents save in isolated instances till toward the end of the century, and they are chiefly in the shape of indulgences and other ecclesiastical manifestos, circulated in all probability in the most limited numbers and peculiarly liable to disappearance.
The Ballad proper cannot be said to be anterior to the closing years of Henry VIII., subsequently to the fall of Cromwell, Earl of Essex, when the composition relative to that incident printed in the collections appeared, and was followed by the series preserved in the library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and reprinted in the writer's Fugitive Tracts, 1875. From the time of Elizabeth onward the broadside in its varied aspects grew abundant, and served as a substitute for newspaper notices, so long as the press remained an insufficient medium. The British Museum and Society of Antiquaries possess large collections of this kind. Lord Crawford has printed a catalogue of his Proclamations, and in the writer's Collections, 1867-92, occur thousands of these ephemerides arranged under what appeared to be their appropriate heads.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the sheet format lent itself largely and conveniently to teachers, quack doctors, astrologers, announcing their addresses, qualifications, and terms, no less than to the official, municipal, or parochial authorities, and to private persons who desired to give publicity to some current matter by the exhibition of the placard on a wall or a church door. There was yet another purpose which the broadside was made to serve: prospectuses of schemes and reports of companies' or societies' proceedings. The purely temporary interest of such publications accounts for their survival in unique examples and even fragments.
There is a general notion that the Harleian Miscellany and the Somers Tracts represent between them a very large proportion of the extant pamphlets and broadsheets published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, as a matter of fact, they do nothing of the sort. Even in or about 1695 William Laycock of the Inner Temple drew attention to the unsuspected importance of these fugitive publications in his printed proposal for buying them up by a public subscription; but even in the National Library, with all its immense accumulations, and in Hazlitt's Collections, many thousands of items are probably deficient; while the two sets of books above mentioned contain a very slender percentage of the whole—in fact, mere representative selections.
There have been men who coupled with a general plan a speciality or two. For instance, Dyce, who laid a collateral stress on Shakespeariana; Ireland, who made himself strong in Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt; Crossley, who had a peculiar affection for Defoe; Bliss, who collected books of characters and books printed at Oxford or just before the Great Fire of 1666; Bandinel, who was smitten by the charms of the Civil War literature; Corser, whose bibliographical sweethearts were Nicholas Breton and Richard Brathwaite; and Rimbault, who had two, Old Music and Old Plays. Mr. G. L. Gomme is similarly situated: anthropology and folklore are his foibles. It goes without saying that the Shakespearian and dramatic student, from Sir Thomas Hanmer downward, has usually made a stand on the literary remains and works tending to illustrate their own labours; but of course the relevance may be direct or indirect, and in the latter case the specialist is found to cast his net surprisingly wide.
