Until the late seventeenth century, ballads were the “most prevalent form of cheap print” (Watt 259). The ballad was “print for singing or print for looking at; a song or a picture or a ‘table’” (257). But during the course of the seventeenth century increasing literacy and affordability of books helped create greater access to books, eventually resulting in a specialized trade in cheap chapbooks and pamphlets—the form of cheap print primarily intended for reading that challenged the ballad’s dominance.

Two main factors in the increasing access to books were literacy and affordability of books. Literacy improved from 1560 to 1580. In East Anglia, for example, full literacy rates for husbandmen increased from 10% to 30%, for yeoman from 45% to 75%, and for tradesmen (in Norwich) from 40%-60%. The literacy rate took a downturn in the period 1580-1610 but picks up again under James and improves even more in the 1630’s (260).

Affordability can be somewhat tricky to determine, but nevertheless it does appear that books were becoming at least somewhat more affordable. Book prices remained fairly constant from 1560-1635, thus—given that because of general inflation “commodities more than doubled in price and wages rose by half to two-thirds”—at the very least books would have become relatively cheaper (261). But despite wage increases general purchasing power fell: necessities cost more and so even with rising wages spending money could be even more scarce; therefore, regardless of the fact that the price of a book may be a smaller percentage of wages, people may still not have been able to afford very many of them. The bottom line: most laborers may not have had any extra money to buy books (cost of living was probably about 11-13 pounds a year; wages probably about 9-10 pounds a year). Husbandmen (with 30 acres) faired better; they may have earned an extra 3-4 pounds a year, so every few months a cheap book might be possible. Lower yeoman, who probably were earning about 40-50 pounds a year would have had no problem buying cheap books (261-2). (Watt does not make the time period for these figures entirely clear, but it seems that she is referring to prices and wages around 1640.)

Book prices were tied fairly closely to the number of sheets of paper used: the industry standard, set by the Stationers’ Company in 1598, was 1/2d per sheet. The cost for shorter works was higher per page at 1d per sheet, falling to the 1/2d standard after about four sheets (262). Except for broadsides, 2d seems to have been the minimum price for a book. Other factors, including the age of the book and illustrations (new vs. old woodblocks), affected the price of books as well. Old books sold for less and new illustrations could double a book’s price (262). There was also a 40% increase in book prices around 1635. Pamphlets and chapbooks were major kinds of cheap print, and the kinds that will be discussed here.

Pamphlets

A pamphlet was a short, unbound book and is commonly thought of as having a “topical, ‘ephemeral’ subject matter” (264). Furthermore, pamphlets demonstrated “different degrees of literary sophistication” and so may have had various audiences (265). There was a decent number of them, “but not enough to establish them as a specialized trade” (266).

Chapbook can be most simply defined as a book carried by a chapman. That definition doesn’t really help, however, for research pre-1640 when inventory wasn’t categorized that way. Therefore pamphlets and chapbooks tend to be defined by subject matter: pamphlets=topical, chapbooks=timeless (e.g., chivalric romances and jests). Furthermore, they need to be defined by audience as well as subject matter, length, and cost. Nevertheless, a specialized format did appear in the seventeenth century. “Penny chapbook” is a way to describe this particular format of book: 5.5 inches x 3.5 inches, 4 to 24 pages (1 to 1.5 sheets of paper). Though the books were cheap, the term should not be taken as a “precise statement about price” (273).

Ballad publishers were probably “responsible for the genesis and nurturing of the trade,” and the fact that they “commanded the right distribution network” was probably an important factor in their role as developers of this new “specialist ‘cheap print’ trade” that developed in the seventeenth century (273). Though there were a few Elizabethan penny-size books, and though some of them share features of later chapbooks, there are not “enough to indicate the beginnings of a new genre” (278). It was in the 1620’s that the “publishers organized themselves into a specialized syndicate for distribution of broadside ballads. The combined evidence also points to this as the period when ballad publishers began consciously to acquire the copyrights to these small books, which they could sell to the same wide market as their ballads” (278).

~ Eric Nebeker

Work Cited

Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Eds. Anthony Fletcher, John Guy and John Morril. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.