Scott's Sixpenny Public

COLEiVIAN O. PARSONS
 

Mention was made in the November, i$66, isstie of Columbia
Library Columns, p. if.!, of the receipt of rare chapbook con¬
densations of Sir Walter Scott's The Pirate and The Fortunes
of Nigel. The donor was the author of this article, to whom we
are further indebted for the description below of the history
and develop-nient of the chapbook editions.           Ldit'or's Note
 

T
 

K If ^HL unconsidered literary trifles of one age often be¬
come the rarities of a later time. So it is w ith the pam¬
phlet condensations of the \A'averl\- Novels brought
out in Scott's own day. A genially puzzled expression came
over the face of Scotland's greatest antiquarian bookseller when
I asked if he had any Waverley "chapbooks." No cop\' had
ever come to his attention. So scarce arc these pamplilets that the
Edinburgh Public Library and the Edinburgh Uni\crsity Li¬
brary do not possess any, although their counterparts in Glas¬
gow, the iVIitchell Library and the Glasgow University Library,
do. Fortunately, items in the private libraries of Dr. James C.
Corson and of Scott at Abbotsford supplement the finest Scot¬
tish collection, which is in the National Library. In England, the
Bodleian and the Cambridge University Librar\' have one
Waverley pamphlet each, and the British .Museum is roughly
comparable to the National Library of Scotland in its holdings.
Although one to three of these pamphlets can be found in the
New York Public Library, the Yale University Library, and
the Library of Congress, the only American assortment of any
impressiveness is to be found at Harvard. Through \-oung
Widener's collector's interest in George Cruikshank, the Har¬
vard University Librar)' has all three of the pamphlets which
he illustrated. The first Waverley no\el to undergo shrinking

■3