1882 1st ed Chapbooks Folklore Legends Superstition Medieval Woodcuts Ashton

1882 1^st ed Chapbooks Folklore Legends Superstition Medieval Woodcuts Ashton

“the only reading matter for the poorer classes, provided a fascinating way into the heroes and legends in popular literature!”

This incredible first edition of John Ashton’s collection of ‘chapbooks’ is illustrated with reproductions of woodcuts, typographical facsimiles, and figures. The stories in this book depict the lives and work of ‘chapmen’ or peddlers, shoemakers, millers, martyrs, and other medieval low-society lives.

“Chapbooks were virtually the only reading matter for the poorer classes and provide for the modern reader a fascinating way into the heroes and legends, folklore and superstitions that prevailed in the popular literature of the age.” (Letellier 118)

This book is one of the three most important works on the study of chapbooks, and is the only one from before the 20^th-century. “John Ashton’s is sometimes eccentric but still valuable.” (Simons 16). This book “provides over 100 chapbooks and facsimiles of the original covers and woodcut illustrations” (Letellier 118).

According to the 1882 ‘Annual Register,’

“Mr. Ashton shows a stratum of the literature of the time ignored as a rule by those who explore its more cultivated depths. Throughout the preceding age the chapbooks, or penny books of 16-24 pages, carried in the pedlar’s pack and hawked about, constituted the only mental food of the poorer classes. This collection, illustrated by characteristic woodcuts, contains many of the old stories and legends familiar to us from our youth as nursery rhymes and fairy tales, as Robin Hood, Reynard the Fox, Valentine and Orson, while the ignorance and superstition of the poor were appealed to in diabolical, legendary, and supernatural tales of the most extraordinary kind.”

Item number: #16177

Price: $499

ASHTON, John

Chap-books of the eighteenth century

London : Chatto and Windus, 1882. First edition.

Details:

• Collation: Complete with all pages
  • xvi, 486, [2]
  • Heavily illustrated throughout
• References: Simons, From Medieval to Medievalism; Letellier, The English Novel, 1700-1740: An annotated bibliography.
• Language: English
• Binding: Hardcover; tight and secure
  • Decorative cloth
• Size: ~7.5in X 5.25in (19.5cm x 13.5cm)

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16177