‘Little Story Books’ and ‘Small Pamphlets’ in Edinburgh, 1680–1760: The Making of the Scottish Chapbook
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the development of the ‘chapbook’ in Scotland between 1680 and 1760. Chapbook is here defined as a publication using a single sheet of paper, printed on both sides, and folded into octavo size or smaller. The discussion focuses on production in Edinburgh which at this time was the centre of the Scottish book trade. While very few works were produced in these small formats in the city before the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the three generations thereafter witnessed their emergence as an important part of the market. This chapbook literature included ‘penny godlies’ and ‘story books’, poems and songs, which had long been staples of the London trade. Indeed, much output north of the border comprised titles pirated from the south. It is suggested, however, that an independent repertoire of distinctively Scottish material also began to flourish during this period which paved the way for the heyday of the nation's chapbook in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Edinburgh trade is shown to be much more extensive than has been appreciated hitherto. Discovery of the testament of Robert Drummond, the Edinburgh printer who died in 1752, reveals that he produced many such works that are no longer extant. It demonstrates not only that a number of classic English chapbooks were being reprinted in Scotland much earlier than otherwise known, but also that an indigenous Scottish output was well established before the reign of George III.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".