song books and hymn books, lives of heroes, historical abridgments, travels, religious histories, abstracts of popular stories and local traditions. To a great extent they illustrated the manners and morals of the time; many of the earlier ones were often as coarse and as rude in thought and expression as they were in mechanical execution; others were quite unfit for children’s reading, from many of our modern points of view, as, for example, “The Afflicted Parents: or the Undutiful Child Punished,” a grew-some and horrible tale; or “A Story of a Young Gentleman who sold Himself to the Devil.” There were also a great number of little books bearing on witchcraft and fortune-telling, which may not have been without effect upon certain barbarous proceedings in our early history.
These books varied in size: a large number were in a small octavo (of the size known as foolscap 8vo), about 5½ x 4¼; but those especially intended for children were more diminutive, generally measuring from 2» x 3½ to 3 x 5 inches; they contained four or multiples of four pages, up to 24 or 32 pages, were printed in the rudest manner on paper of the coarsest character, sometimes put into a wrapper of a kind of wall paper, and decorated with woodcuts which as often as not had no reference to the text, or a very remote one indeed. In some of the New England reprints this latter feature was often most striking, the art of woodcutting being little practised and engravers being scarce, as may be inferred from the fact of Thomas, the printer, learning to cut his own blocks. The same woodcuts were made to do duty over and over again, with some grotesque results. Mr. MacMaster, referring in a chapter already quoted to a reprint of an English book, and dealing with a group of these publications, says:
“No child had then ever seen such specimens of the wood engraver’s and the printer’s and the binder’s arts as now, at the approach of every Christmas, issue from hundreds of presses. The covers of such chapbooks were bits of wood, and the backs coarse leather. On the covers was sometimes a common blue paper, and sometimes a hideous wall paper, adorned with horses and dogs, roosters and eagles, standing in marvellous attitudes on gilt or copper scrolls. The letterpress of none was specially illustrated, but the same cut was used again and again to express the most opposite ideas. A woman with a dog holding her train is now Vanity, and now Miss Allworthy going abroad to buy books for her brother and sister. A huge vessel with three masts is now a yacht, and now the ship in which Robinson Crusoe sailed from Hull. The virtuous woman that is a crown to her husband and naughty Miss Kitty Bland are one and the same. Master Friendly listening to the minister at church now heads a catechism and now figures as Tommy Careless in the ‘Adventures of a Week.’ A man and woman feeding beggars become, in time, transformed into a servant introducing two misers to his mistress. But no creature played so many parts as a bird which, after being named an eagle, a cuckoo, and a kite, is called finally Noah’s dove.”
But these chapbooks received their deathblow about the middle of the eighteenth century. They lingered on in England for the next fifty years or more, and somewhat longer in New England, as we have already seen. They had a long career, for catalogues of them exist dated as far back as 1598. They served their purpose and have disappeared, and are now become so rare as to be classed among the most treasured prizes of the book collector. The largest and most representative collection in the world is that in the library of Harvard University, made by Professor F. J. Child; but its value to the student is much impaired by the lack of a classified catalogue. It contains few specimens of American reprints or of chapbooks of American origin; and
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