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'Chapbooks printed in Scotland' contains the following 42 items:

Chapbooks printed in Scotland
Permanent URLhttps://digital.nls.uk/104184103
DescriptionOver 3,000 chapbooks published in Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries. Subjects include courtship, humour, occupations, fairs, apparitions, war, politics, crime, executions, Jacobites, transvestites, and freemasonry. Chapbooks are small booklets of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages, often illustrated with crude woodcuts. Produced cheaply and sold by peddlars on the streets, they formed the staple reading material of the common people, along with broadsides.
Additional NLS resources:
  • Street literature about Napoleon's wars
    Collection of 78 Scottish chapbooks recounting events from the late 1790s to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Cheap print booklets mostly containing ballads about the military conflicts. Also give insights into contemporary views of Napoleon Bonaparte, Josephine de Beauharnais, Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington.
  • A brief introduction to chapbooks
    A one-page introduction to chapbooks, with information about the 4,000 held in our Rare Book collections.
  • Broadsides website, 'The word on the street'
    Discover early news stories and ballads that informed and entertained Scots between 1650 and 1910 as you browse around 1,800 broadsides.
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