Broadside Black-letter Ballads, printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; chiefly in the possession of J. Payne Collier. Illustrated by Original Woodcuts / Twenty-five Old Ballads and Songs [...] /A few Odds and Ends for cheerful friends [...]

Broadside Black-letter Ballads, printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; chiefly in the possession of J. Payne Collier. Illustrated by Original Woodcuts / Twenty-five Old Ballads and Songs [...] /A few Odds and Ends for cheerful friends [...]

Author: Collier, J. Payne (John Payne) (ed.)

Year: 1868

4to. Half morocco, original red wrappers bound in. Ex libris bookplate of Allan D. MacDonald on front pastedown; “David Jyfe Anderson 2.9.50” written on top of bookplate. Laid in note written by John Payne Collier on September 23 1871. Broadside Black-letter Ballads (Bib# 4117243/Fr# 1065) pp. [4], xiv, 130. Signatures: [pi]2 a4 b3 B-R4 S1. Broadside Black-letter Ballads offered texts of twenty-five ‘ballads,’ that is, narrative, reflective, and occasional verse, all ostensibly taken from printed broadsides of ca. 1550-1660. With its accompanying woodcut illustrations in quasi-facsimile, it made an attractive mid-sized volume, patterned after Collier’s Roxburghe Ballads of 1847, but inspired, according to Collier, by ‘the excellent and liberal manner in which Mr. [Henry] Hutch has recently made his vast store of ballads accessible to the Philobiblon Society,’ and dedicated to Frederic Ouvry as a ‘trifling tribute of high respect and sincere affection.’ The thirteen broadsides then in the possession of Collier were all sold by him to Ouvry before 1870. The Broadside Black-letter Ballads contain many careless errors and deliberate falsifications, from misreadings to calculated misrep