Chapbooks Collection
The University collection has nearly 100 chapbooks, many of which were published by James Kendrew on Colliergate in York.
They are a mixture of text and woodcut illustrations, some containing stories based on the city and the surrounding area.
About the collection
Chapbooks are small, paper-covered booklets, the comic books and magazines of their day, and were especially popular in the first half of the 19th-century.
They would have been sold by the travelling ‘chapman’ and included different themes such as almanacs, children's literature, folk tales, ballads, nursery rhymes, pamphlets, poetry, and political and religious tracts.
Highlights
- York Cries for the amusement of good children shows the different street sellers of the city, such as Poor Betty, the sand woman and the man who sells oysters at Ouse Bridge. The first page tells us that the illustrations are ‘from life’ so it's exciting to think that this little book brings us closer to the people of York from 200 years ago.
Acquisition
Over 50 of the chapbooks are part of the Raymond Burton Yorkshire collection with the others acquired through donation or purchase.
Related collections
York Minster Library has nearly 200 chapbooks dating from 1687 which include 31 James Kendrew publications and another 18 printed by other York publishers from the 18th- and 19th-centuries.
Further information
- The collection is also freely available via the digital library Jstor
- A census of Kendrew chapbooks was produced in 1988 and the University holds at least one copy that is not recorded in the census and is almost certainly unique. It's a copy of The butterfly's ball, and grasshopper's feast and, although a bit battered, is very precious to us.