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This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature. The breadth and depth of the contributions give a much fuller and more nuanced picture of what was being widely published and read during this period than has previously been available. It will be of great value to scholars and students of eighteenth-century popular culture and literature, print history and the book trade, ballad and folk studies, children’s literature, and social history.

When walking down the street, it is not uncommon to see lost items that have escaped their proper receptacles, but how often does one stop to read the messages left behind? David Lazar has stopped often, capturing the pieces of a “lost world on the streets” and thinking about the life of the discarder from the fragments left behind.Stories of the Street is a series of imaginative meditations—through prose poems, short-short essays, microfictions, and prose pieces without precise genre distinction—of what it means to encounter lost or discarded texts. Rather than simply deconstructing the lists, notes, receipts, or book pages he finds strewn in various cities, Lazar uses them as suggestive, capable of inspiring possible narratives that are at most latent in the text itself. The encounter, then, is an encounter with oneself and the mysteries of cities, where detritus frequently doubles as a sign saying, “Consider this.” Lazar's narrative voice ranges in tone from the comically antic to the melancholy. By photographing what he describes as “messages that had escaped their bottles” on-location as found, Lazar has become a flaneur of paper debris, puzzling over the evidence of urban human life.

1st.—A child born on this day, will not live to any great age, is likely to have many excellent friends, and will do well in business, have much money and property, of a very hasty temper, liable to fevers, falls, hurts, bruises, harm by horses, &c. The most successful years for gain and good fortune, are their 19th, 24th, 27th, 35th, 38th, and 42nd; will marry at 19, or 22 years of age. This day is good to send messages, write letters, apply to surgeons, take medicine, travel, or open shops, favourable to sell, but not to buy, aged people may favour you on this day. 2nd.—A child born on this day, will be fortunate, and gain much by their own perseverance, they will have few enemies, and may gain by deaths; of good temper, and obliging disposition, and will enjoy tolerable good health throughout life. The most successful years, for gain and good fortune, rises in life, &c. are the 17th, 21st, 25th, 29th, 34th, 41st, 53rd, and 62nd. Will Marry in the 20th, or 23rd, year of age, and gain many friends by marriage. This day is good to buy, or sell, to let houses and land, favourable for gardening, to purchase new clothes, apply to females, collect debts, &c. 3rd.—If born on this day, will be very liable to hardships up to the 21st birthday, after that period, will have more success, and better friends, may be rather public, and remove or travel in their business, or calling; moderate good health, liable to have imprisonment. The most successful time for gain, and prosperity, commences after 38 years of age, will marry in the 21st or 25th year of age. This day is good to take medicine, and to deal with Ironmongers, Jewellers, Booksellers, and those who sell ladies wearing apparel, good to marry, and send letters to either sex, commence law suits, &c. 4th.