This collection of links focuses on early modern print culture with an emphasis on street culture, broadsides, and ballads. It is by no means complete; please feel free to suggest further links in the comments.
See also Manuscripts & Images and c18th on this site, and Pinterest page, Print culture.
UNB students: remember the very useful UNB Libraries’ English Guides
This page:
Ballads
Broadsides/chapbooks/ephemera
Weblogs
Ballads:
- The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Ed. Francis James Child
- A “Working” KWIC Concordance to Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898), Cathy Lynn Preston, University of Colorado
- Contemplator.com: an oldie but a goodie
- Kenneth S. Goldstein Collection of American Song Broadsides, Center for Popular Music: “nearly 3,300 American song broadsides”
- Legends: Ballads & Broadsides
- Roots of Folk: Old English, Scots, and Irish Songs and Tunes (archived)
- Sixteenth Century Ballads: “a work in progress” (buckets of links)
- The Traditional Ballad Index: “an annotated bibliography of the folk songs of the English-speaking world”
Broadsides/chapbooks/ephemera:
- A to Z of Ephemera: based on exhibition in Dept of Typography & Graphic Communication, U of Reading, 18.9.17–8.12.17. Colourful!
- Blackletter Ballads
- Bodleian Libraries: images of manuscripts; broadside ballads; broadside ballads online
- British Library: Street literature
- British Printed Images to 1700: “a digital library of prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain”
- Brown University Broadsides Collection
- The Contemplator’s Short History of Broadside Ballads
- Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration (DMVI): “records and images of 868 literary illustrations that were published in or around 1862”
- Stanford U: Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls: “over 8,000 individual items, and includes long runs of the major dime novel series”
- Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders: Crime broadsides, Harvard Law School Library
- English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA): “76.16% of early English ballads” (open access)
- Ephemera Society (UK): excellent links to museums, organizations, and on-line resources
- Glasgow Broadside Ballads: The Murray Collection, including links and resources
- Kenneth S. Goldstein Broadsides, U Mississippi
- Jane Johnson’s Manuscript Nursery Library, Lilly Library, Indiana U: “digital images of every item in this unique collection of materials made by an 18th-century Englishwoman for the instruction of her children” (open access)
- John Johnson Collection: (proprietary: UNB or other login required)
- Library of Congress: Printed Ephemera: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera: 10,172 items available online; focus on U.S. (open access)
- Lilly Library Chapbook Collection, Indiana U: “1,900 chapbooks” (open access)
- The Making of a Broadside Ballad (Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.)
- McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection (open access)
- National Library of Scotland Digitised Collections: Chapbooks printed in Scotland; English ballads; The word on the street (open access)
- Elizabeth Nesbitt Chapbook collection, University of Pittsburgh: catalogue of 270+ chapbooks printed in England, America, and Scotland between the years of 1650 and1850; a few digitized items (open access)
- Oxford Digital Collections: 18th Century Entertainment Ephemera
- Price One Penny: Cheap Literature, 1837-1860 (POP) (open access)
- The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: London’s central criminal court, 1674–1913 (see Ordinaries’ accounts)
- Scottish Chapbooks Project, University of Guelph (open access)
- Sixteenth Century Ballads: including links to many online books
- The Ephemera of John Smith by Adam McNaughton, Glasgow University Library Special Collections
- Streetprint: Revolution and Romanticism: “a private collection of street literature held in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada… mostly from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries”
- Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project: “verses in vogue with the vulgar”
- “The Trade Cards of Old London,” Spitalfields Life (blog, open access)
- Stanford U: Victorian Reading Project: “Our goal is to reanimate, for modern readers, the Victorian encounter with serialized novels, read as they were intended to be—one issue at a time”
- From the Bottom Up: “popular reading and writing in the Michael Zinman Collection of early American imprints” (open access)
Weblogs:
- Jenni Hyde: “Early modern history, music and musings”
- Spitalfields Life
[Source of image on preceding page]
Mrs. Spectator's Commonplace Book 