Pliego

Broadside ballads were popular songs, sold for a penny or halfpenny in the streets of towns and villages around Britain between the 16th century and early 20th centuries. They preceded chapbooks, but had similar content, marketing and distribution systems:“If you want to buy, I’m your chap”. There are records from Cambridgeshire as early as in 1553 of a man offering a scurrilous ballad maistres mass at an alehouse, and a pedlar selling lytle books to people, including a patcher of old clothes in 1578. These sales are probably characteristic of the market for chapbooks.

Because of their flimsy nature such ephemera rarely survive as individual items. They were aimed at buyers without formal libraries and, in an era when paper was expensive, were used for wrapping or baking. Paper has also always had hygienic uses; there are contemporary references to the use of chapbooks as bum fodder. Many of the surviving chapbooks come from the collections of Samuel Pepys between 1661 and 1688 which are now held at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The antiquary Anthony Wood also collected 65 chapbooks, (including 20 from before 1660), which are now in the Bodleian Library. There are also significant Scottish collections, such as those held by the University of Glasgow and the National Library of Scotland.