Among the four hundred and sixty-six books of a religious tone, by far the best was ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,” printed at Boston in 1681 and reprinted in 1706.

In certain parts of southern Germany an old and curious custom still prevails of a public burning of the almanacs of the year just closed, the moment the stroke of twelve has sounded on the last night of the old year. The ceremony is accompanied with much cheering, letting off of firecrackers and pistols, and general cries of “Prosit neujahr.” The New Englanders of old times had no such annual holocaust; but the almanacs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have disappeared almost as completely as if they had followed this ancient German fashion.¹ Sometimes, however, they were preserved. J. T. Buckingham, the printer, tells in his Recollections, when a boy, that he was indebted for much useful instruction to a regular pile of almanacs covering nearly or quite fifty years, some of them being dated as far back as 1720; these he read often and with never-lessening interest, enjoying the many fragments of history, scraps of poetry, anecdotes, epigrams, etc., with which they abounded.

The making of almanacs was the earliest enterprise of the colonial printer; and as they constituted so large a part of colonial literature there is little doubt that the almanac furnished reading for many other such young folk as Buckingham, as well as for their elders, for whom it was a daily vade mecum; for with the exception of the Bible and perhaps the “New England Primer,” it was in many families the sole reading matter for the entire twelve months. And, indeed, they might have found much worse reading matter than that which “Poor Richard” gave them. His pithy and pregnant maxims and aphorisms stick like burrs on the memory, and there is little doubt that they have helped in the formation of the prudent, thrifty and careful character of many a New Englander who has left behind him in the shape of houses, lands and other of this world’s gear substantial evidence of the effects of the wise and “canny” teachings of Benjamin Franklin. As lately as between forty and fifty years ago, “Poor Richard’s” sayings were printed in England in the form of a tract, for distribution, and as a broadside for hanging on cottage walls. One of these was among the earliest things I can remember reading. I met extracts from it later in our school reading books; and to this day there abides with me the memory of Franklin’s rechauffé of the “wisdom of many ages and nations” made to dwell in the brain by reason of the rugged common sense and witty manner in which he gave expression to it anew.

Long before the end of the last century this country had been flooded first with importations, and then with reprints, of the little books to which we now give the name of chapbooks, on account of their having been sold in England by the wandering chapmen or peddlers; and they continued to be reprinted here until the present century was well on its way. The word chapman comes from the same root as the German kaufman, Flemish koopman; it formerly meant both buyer and seller, but later became restricted to the latter meaning. Cheapside and Eastcheap, which together once constituted the central mart of London, enshrine their history in the names they have borne for centuries.

The chapman used to sell all kinds of trinkets, small haberdashery, stationery and books, which he carried in a pack or “maund” hanging from his neck before him. The books he carried covered a wide range of subject: A B C books, the old nursery rhymes, fairy tales and wonder stories, fables, primers, riddle books,