Broadside Black-letter Ballads, printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; chiefly in the possession of J. Payne Collier. Illustrated by Original Woodcuts / Twenty-five Old Ballads and Songs [...] /A few Odds and Ends for cheerful friends [...]

4to. Half morocco, original red wrappers bound in. Ex libris bookplate of Allan D. MacDonald on front pastedown; “David Jyfe Anderson 2.9.50” written on top of bookplate. Laid in note written by John Payne Collier on September 23 1871.

Broadside Black-letter Ballads (Bib# 4117243/Fr# 1065)

pp. [4], xiv, 130. Signatures: [pi]2 a4 b3 B-R4 S1. 

Broadside Black-letter Ballads offered texts of twenty-five ‘ballads,’ that is, narrative, reflective, and occasional verse, all ostensibly taken from printed broadsides of ca. 1550-1660. With its accompanying woodcut illustrations in quasi-facsimile, it made an attractive mid-sized volume, patterned after Collier’s Roxburghe Ballads of 1847, but inspired, according to Collier, by ‘the excellent and liberal manner in which Mr. [Henry] Hutch has recently made his vast store of ballads accessible to the Philobiblon Society,’ and dedicated to Frederic Ouvry as a ‘trifling tribute of high respect and sincere affection.’ The thirteen broadsides then in the possession of Collier were all sold by him to Ouvry before 1870. The Broadside Black-letter Ballads contain many careless errors and deliberate falsifications, from misreadings to calculated misrepresentations. For an overview, see A. & J. Freeman, John Payne Collier. Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, 2004, II, pp. 957-959, A156.

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Twenty-five Old Ballads and Songs: from manuscripts in the possession of J. Payne Collier, Octogen. A Birthday Gift (Bib# 4117249/Fr# 1071)

pp. [4], 56.

A collection of ballads and songs from the reigns of Elizabeth and James I issued by Collier as a gift for his friends on his own eightieth birthday. The texts are all deriving from Collier’s own spurious ‘Hall Commonplace Book’ (Folger MS V.a.339), with the exception of ‘To sea! To sea!,’ a rousing forty-line nautical challenge that is otherwise unknown and assumed to be Collier’s own composition. Other sources are known for two items in the work (‘Against Idelnes’ by John Heywood, and the anonymous ‘Daintie Come Thou to Me’) but in both instances Collier has altered the genuine texts. See A. & J. Freeman, John Payne Collier. Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, 2004, A162.

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A few Odds and Ends for cheerful friends. A Christmas Gift (Bib# 4117257/Fr# 1079)

pp. [2], ii, 52. 

Work proffered as a Christmas gift, but in fact dated on Collier’s eighty-first birthday, including 41 specimens of Collier’s original verse, ‘written between the ages of 18 and the same figures reversed,’ and ‘whatever might be considered inconsistent with the hilarity of the season has been purposely excluded.’ See A. & J. Freeman, John Payne Collier. Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, 2004, II, A170.

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