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This paper seeks to establish some preliminary numbers for the survival rates of some different kinds of cheap print, especially ballads and chapbooks, from the second half of the eighteenth century. The basic method is to compare contemporary booksellers' lists with modern records of surviving copies, especially ESTC. An important question is whether survival rates can be correlated with price and/or type of content, and whether the publications of certain booksellers have survived better than others. Methodological problems of such a study include variation in sample size, and especially the unreliability of results based on very small samples, and the critical role of collectors in ensuring that publications of this kind survived at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sad story of how the collector John Blacker was deceived by the forger Hagué, masquerading under the name of Caulin, through the intermediacy of the bookseller Bernard Quaritch, has already been told. However, after the death in 2009 of Carmen Blacker, the great-grand-daughter of the unhappy collector, and the papers concerning her great-grandfather's library, that she had inherited, combined with some hitherto unexplored material in Quaritch's archive, further light has been shed on what happened to the collection after John Blacker's death on 6 April 1896 and the discovery by his son, Carlos, that his father's priceless library consisted of heavily over-priced fakes. Of particular relevance in this context is a number of ‘coffrets’, caskets in silver, leather, bronze, and iron, engraved, tooled or painted, enclosing some of the books and often offered at quite steep prices. Did Bernard Quaritch knowingly deceive his best client? What happened to Mr Blacker's books after his death? This article addresses these and other details in the light of the surviving evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]