by John Crabb - £12.99 The British Library Publishing Division (2017)
paperback
ISBN 13: 9780712356725 | ISBN 10: 071235672x
This beautifully designed book highlights some of the most striking and amusing examples from the British Library’s collections and provides brief commentary on the political and social background of thetimes. Frequent topics of illustration include monsters, witches, criminals, drinking, war and politics.
The invention of the printing press led to an explosion of cheap printed materials in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries. Ballads were no longer confined to the soapbox. Mass communication was nowpossible. The broadsides pasted on walls and disseminated among the masses, together with the writtenballads hawked at street corners, represented the zeitgeist of popular culture in early modern Europe.
Frequently designed in ‘blackletter’ gothic type and accompanied with distinctive woodcut illustrations,this dynamic, lively form encompassed the obsessions and characteristic humour of the times.
(Price & availability last checked: June 2017)
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