Since the Pennsylvania-German broadsides featured in this book are for the most part in the German language, it is necessary to look at the German vocabulary of the broadside. The commonest German word for broadside is Flugblatt, which my old standard Cassell dictionary defines as “pamphlet, broadsheet, handbill,” which is correct if one omits the word “pamphlet.” The prefix Flug means “flying,” and Blatt means “sheet” or “leaf.” The plural, fliegende Blätter, amusingly suggests leaves flying through the air in all directions, just as polemical broadsides did figuratively “fly” in the Renaissance/Reformation period. These words are of course similar and related to the English synonym “flyer,” mentioned above. Finally there is the plain, no-nonsense German definition of broadside as Einblattdruck—literally, a sheet or leaf of paper printed on one side. The Danish spin-off of this cumbersome German word is Etbladstryck, literally, “one-sheet-print.” According to the Laurits Bødker dictionary of folk literature, the definition is “a single, usually illustrated leaf printed on one side only, containing all sorts of announcements for Christian edification, historical, often sensational news, reports of strange events, and various forms of folk literature.” Similar terms entered the other Scandinavian languages, undoubtedly via German scholarship.

In defining the terms Flugblatt and Flugschrift in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Rolf Wilhelm Brednich of the University of Göttingen enlightens us as follows: “By the term Flugblatt is understood an unfolded sheet printed with lettering or a graphic design (woodcut, copperplate engraving, or etching), or a combination of both types.” He informs us also that the word is a relatively late coinage in German. It first appeared in 1787 as a translation of the somewhat earlier French term feuille volante. A Flugschrift, on the other hand, is a paper-covered pamphlet or small book made by folding one or more folio sheets printed on both sides. For our use the term Flugblatt is best translated as “broadside,” and Flugschrift as “pamphlet” or “chapbook.” Both are classic examples of printed wares, peddled and sold at markets and fairs, that can be called “street literature.”

According to Professor Brednich, the Flugschrift is a product of printing that spread enormously in consequence of the Protestant Reformation. These early pamphlets were “independent, non-periodical, and bound in paper.” Their main purpose was to present information on the political and religious questions of the day. But soon new themes were added, addressed to a broader readership. In folk-cultural research many of these early booklets can be considered Volksbücher—“folk books” or books directed to a popular audience, i.e., chapbooks hawked on the streets, at markets and fairs, or carried about by “chapmen” or colporteurs.

A large number of the sixteenth-century chapbooks presented song material, either Geistliche Lieder (spiritual songs) enjoyed by the pious outside the church services, or Weltliche Lieder (worldly songs) whose subject matter ranged from tragic ballads to comic and erotic verse. Song pamphlets remained popular long after their first appearance in print. For example, the German Folksong Archive at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau has a collection of at least ten thousand originals or copies of song chapbooks from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

The commonest title printed on the German broadside during its first century of development was Newe Zeitung—which can be translated “New Tidings” or “News Report.” “News” was appropriate since many broadsides told of recent events, wars, battles, tragedies, and wonders. There were as yet no “newspapers” as such, but when they did arrive on the scene in the main German cities in the seventeenth century, they took over the old word Zeitung, cognate with English “tidings,” as in the biblical Christmas-story phrase “tidings of great joy.” The German word Zeit, of course, basically means “time”; it was also later used in the word for printed periodicals, like magazines or journals, which were and still are called Zeitschriften in German—“writings or publications issued from time to time.”

European Origins of the Broadside

Broadsides as such—single pieces of paper printed on one side—appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages, even before the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century. Woodcuts and metalcuts were widespread, often small in format and with minimal texts. The great majority of them were devotional prints portraying the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ and the lives and martyrdoms of saints, particularly the Virgin Mary. There is a striking one of Saint Augustine preaching to a kneeling congregation and addressing the Holy Trinity, who appear in the upper right corner. Saint Francis receiving the stigmata was a popular subject, as were John the Baptist and Saint Christopher, and Saint Martin sharing his cloak with the beggar. A curious print of the side wound of Christ, with hands and feet revealing their wounds also, reminds us of the later Moravian emphasis on the wound theology.

The metalcuts, which appear to be limited to the second half of the fifteenth century, have a different look from the woodcuts, which resemble line drawings. The metalcuts, with every surface filled with designs, resemble textiles or tapestries. The Rhineland metalcut was a relief print combining characteristics of woodcut and engraving on a plate of copper or lead. Backgrounds were often filled in with dots punched into the metal, hence they were often called “dotted prints” (German Schrotblatt, French manière criblée). In general the designs were complex, with every surface filled, but by 1500 the increased sophistication of both woodcut and engraving overtook and replaced the metalcut.

Popular Reading Matter and the Broadside

German folk culture scholars have researched rather widely the subject of “popular reading matter” (Volkslesestoff) in the home, especially of the lower classes, urban as well as rural. The meager bookshelf of the common man in the past usually included the minimal farmer’s library (if Protestant) of Bible, sermon book (Hauspostille), prayer book, hymnal, and almanac. Other books could also be found in farmhouses and city workers’ dwellings. These included the so-called chapbooks of entertaining stories, lives of heroes and rogues (like the dashing Rinaldo Rinaldini, for example), pseudo-saints’ stories (Genoveva, for example), travel accounts, love stories, joke books, and similar productions.

Earlier, in the Middle Ages, when few people could read and before printed books made their appearance, oral literature circulated. This included such materials as the fairytale or fable (Märchen), the myth, the legend (Sage), and the jest. In the Middle Ages there were manuscript books, but these were largely the province of the clergy and educated nobles or the wealthy urban patrician class. Hence these extremely popular oral materials were often formally read or recited, and undoubtedly sometimes sung, to a rapt group of listeners by a skilled and often itinerant storyteller—as is still the case in some traditional cultures of Asia and Africa.

The book revolution brought about by the invention of printing in the fifteenth century reshaped the field, and oral folk literature was transmuted into print. The Bible was put into German and medieval epics and stories became the chapbook or Volksbuch. The jests were collected into printed joke books, like the Eulenspiegel series, for example, and dream books and other exciting or titillating genres made their appearance at the markets and fairs and were eagerly bought, carried home, and read.

A novel category of popular reading matter—and the one on which we now focus—was the broadside. Medieval woodblock prints preceded the broadside before the rise of printing with movable type, but they had only minimal texts and one focused on the picture. As pointed out above, some of these were bound into rough book formats, usually dealing with one subject, such as the Lives of the Saints, the Passion of Christ, or the Dance of Death.

The earliest true printed broadsides of set type plus woodcut or other illustrations were of several kinds. When they reported on local or national events as “news” (Nachrichten, Berichte), they went by the name Newe Zeytung. An example of a fifteenth-century Newe Zeytung is the letter Columbus sent in 1493 to the royal treasurer Sanchez, reporting on his discoveries in the New World. This was news indeed and exciting news at that.

The Newe Zeytung type of broadside continued in popularity through much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until the people’s thirst for news finally led to the establishment of the first German newspapers. The news broadside, however, continued operating parallel to the newspaper, often reporting on sensational crimes, criminal confessions, the appearance of comets and other heavenly phenomena, etc. Many of these broadside stories were reworked into ballads ending with pointed moral warnings to the reader, which a newspaper account might not necessarily include.

It is of great interest to compare the themes of the fifteenth-century broadsides—the earliest in the age of the printed word—with the themes and range of the Pennsylvania German broadside. Let us do just that by going through the volume Einblattdrucke des XV. Jahrhunderts: Ein Bibliographisches Verzeichnis (1914). This indispensable book catalogs 1,574 separate items printed by the year 1500 as found in the major public and private collections in Europe available at the time to the compilers. Some examples, the editors report, turned up in unusual places: bound into books, tied up in bundles of Akten on dusty archive shelves, or listed temptingly for purchase in sale catalogs of secondhand book dealers.

First of all, a survey of this pioneer checklist of the European broadside repertoire shows many items that find no or only peripheral resonance in the Pennsylvania German broadside world. There are, for instance, hundreds of Ablassbriefe, or indulgence letters, many issued in the 1470s for the benefit of the struggle against the Turks and the defense of Rhodes and Cyprus. Others were for the benefit of individual churches, monasteries, or monastic orders. There are also Pestbriefe, or pestilence letters, some with prayers to Saint Anna (mother of the Virgin Mary) against incursions of the plague. Many Catholic prayer sheets with petitions to other saints are found too—to Christopher and, most interesting, to Dionysus—for protection against the so-called French sickness or French pox, i.e., syphilis. Certain song broadsides, like “Es flog ein kleines Waldvögelein” (There Flew a Little Woodland Bird), circa 1498, listed the tunes to which they were sung. In addition, there are prayers directed to Christ and to the Virgin Mary.

For the parish priests there are lists of the gospel readings for each Sunday of the church year. Spiritual songs appear also, a good example being “Was Freud ist hier in diesem Jammerthale?” (What Joy Is Here in This Vale of Tears?). Papal bulls and missives proliferate, including the bull for the canonization of Saint Leopold in 1485. There are also edicts of secular rulers. A few medical broadsides turn up, as, for example, “Instructions on Making the Balsam or Salve of Mary Magdalene” (ca. 1480), and even a Laxierkalender, or schedule of purgation for the taking of laxatives. Finally there are the secular invitations to elaborately staged shooting matches held in the towns, with attractive prizes (Glückshafen). One shooting match, at Speyer in 1487, added an additional enticement—the killing of a pig by blind participants—zu einem Sau-Totschlagen für Blinde—not exactly a children’s game of Blind Man’s Buff.

• 1. The Almanac, printed as a one-page calendar.
  
• 2. The Himmelsbrief, or heaven-letter, the earliest of which seems to be the Saint Michael version (ca. 1500).
  
• 3. The Letter of Publius Lentulus, Epistola de Christo.
  
• 4. The Spiritual Song (Geistliches Lied) of the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross (ca. 1500).
  
• 5. The Ages of Man, even accompanied with the verses—popular in Pennsylvania—ending with 90—der Kinder Spott, and 100—Gnad des Gott.
  
• 6. Instructions for Bleeding or Cupping (Aderlassungen), ca. 1470. These instructions are, however, given in verse form. In Pennsylvania they were found in the back of the early almanacs.

How were broadsides marketed in the past? When we look at the marketing system for such ephemera as the broadside, we have to consider the places or events at which great numbers of people gathered in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. First of all, there were the Jahrmärkte, or annual fairs, held in the cities, although many localities featured spring and fall fairs, usually linked to a saint’s day. Towns of a size between village and city were often, technically speaking, market towns, with legally prescribed market privileges. In addition, the villages held annual Kirchweihen or Kirchmessen (Kirmessen), originally in honor of the parish’s patron saint, later and into the present day a secular town fair, held once a year, with a carnival-like atmosphere. At all these widely attended festivals of faith and merchandising, booths were set up where broadsides and saints’ prints were sold, and many a peasant or townsman bought them to take home with him.

In the case of a saint’s picture or religious scene, the piece might end up in a primitive frame in the so-called “holy corner” of the farmhouse. This was the Catholic practice. Protestant peasants might also purchase broadsides or prints for display on the walls of their homes. A picture of Luther or Calvin might remind them how Protestant they were, and an engraving of a popular court preacher at Heidelberg or Stuttgart might serve as a role model for growing children, since the family probably had a sermon book (Postille) in the house from the pen of that eloquent clergyman.

Apart from public gatherings such as markets and fairs, broadsides and devotional prints were also marketed by traveling peddlers, usually called colporteurs, who tramped through the countryside, staying overnight in the farmhouses, where they often brought news and scandal and new songs from the outside world. If they peddled song broadsides, they probably sang them in the family circle. That way family members learned the tune from hearing it through thirty-two or more verses of a ballad, and they bought the ballad broadside for the words.

Among the earliest broadsides to be peddled in the countryside were the indulgence broadsides. These were blessed by the Catholic hierarchy and sold by itinerant friars, some of whom had reputations that were on the shady side. An indulgence was a promise that a soul could be freed from the temporal penalties for sin, i.e., from Purgatory. They first appear in the eleventh century, and the money from their sale went to Rome. In the early sixteenth century an indulgence peddler named Tetzel, working the Saxon towns and countryside in the time of Luther, is credited with creating one of the most intriguing advertising jingles in the history of merchandizing. It goes, in German:

Sobald der Pfennig im Kasten klingt,
Die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt!

I have translated this as:

As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from Purgatory springs!

Or if you prefer this one, also my own:

As soon as the coin rings in the chest,
The soul springs forth to heavenly rest!

Which is as good as any of the Burma Shave jingles that used to distract drivers along our highways.

The principle involved in the indulgence was that the people who bought these documents thought that as soon as they were paid for, the soul of a dead kinsman or kinswoman could leave Purgatory, the so-called intermediate state between Heaven and Hell, to which souls that were not quite ready for Heaven were consigned to be purged of their sins. In folk prints these souls are pictured standing in the midst of flames, and they are referred to as “poor souls,” probably the origin of our common English expression “poor souls” for persons who are somehow deficient in some way and need attention.

The sale of indulgences in the sixteenth century was one of the causes that sparked Luther’s call for reformation. Protestantism abolished Purgatory as an imaginary clearinghouse between Heaven and Hell, thus making man’s eternal destiny black and white, so to speak—either Hell or Heaven, with no gray Purgatory in between.

Broadside Peddlers in Trouble with the Law

According to the council minutes of German cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, itinerant song peddlers and street singers were often considered a nuisance and were warned to clear out or face imprisonment. A petition sent in to the City Council of Breslau by the town’s bookbinders complained “that hitherto divers young rogues (losse Buben) have been found here at the yearly fairs and also between the fairs, with various pictures, new tidings and songs, which they not only sold, but also even publicly cry out and sing.”

Another amusing reference comes from Nürnberg, where in 1594 the local booksellers and broadside producers (Briefmaler) threatened to clear away the “New Tidings” carriers and song singers from the streets and taverns. So here we get the picture that the broadside sellers entered the public houses to sell their wares and entertain the drinking and eating guests, much as flower sellers and lottery-ticket vendors still enter taverns today in some parts of Europe to circulate among the people offering their wares.

Another blast against broadside song peddlers is dated 1742 and comes from the Circle of Swabia (Württemberg). Because of the company in which they were included, it appears that their reputation had not perceptibly risen since the seventeenth century—they were still marginal characters in German society. The document, with italics added, reads as follows:

All foreign beggars and vagrants, either Christian or Jew, deserters and dismissed soldiers, peddlers or such folk, who have for sale all kinds of little riffraff wares such as toothpicks, tooth powder, hair butter, bouquets of flowers, shoe blacking, printed songs, and the like, and carry them about and under this pretence actually beg, principally too the singers of scandalous songs, itinerant students, hurdy-gurdy players, dudelsack blowers and other pipers, zither players, strap cutters, lottery criers, etc., shall immediately betake themselves out of the region of this Circle of Swabia.

In the Danube lands, as well as elsewhere in Europe, the pamphlet and picture peddlers often got into trouble with the authorities, especially the ecclesiastical censors. In 1667 the Jesuits, as officially appointed censors, roamed the Linz Market and seized schändliche Liedertexte, Bilder und Bücher und übergaben sie den Flammen (scandalous song texts, pictures, and books, and committed them to the flames). They also seized amulets peddled by the same individuals on the grounds that they spread the contagion of superstition. In 1752 and 1759 official edicts prohibited the introduction of forbidden (Lutheran) books, which were entering the province from Protestant Germany.

The most amusing case occurred in 1754, in the official account of which we even learn the nickname of the peddler. The priest of Harthausen in that year complained over a certain book and picture peddler from Bavaria,

commonly called Brief-Steffl [literally Broadside Steven], who in that region went around peddling his wares. In general, such vagabond pamphlet and picture hawkers are always a danger in the villages, even when they are Catholic, since, through their greediness for sales, all kinds of superstitious blessings, prayers, disgraceful songs and other things, endangering faith and morals, are spread about among the simple and credulous farmer folk, the like of which I collected a whole basketful from my parishioners and burned.

From all of this it appears that the streets of German towns must have been amusing, entertaining, and irresistible to the urban public, who were always ready for free entertainment.

The Broadside in Great Britain and Anglo-America

From the Rhineland and the Netherlands the art of printing reached England, whence it spread to all parts of the British Isles. The usual date for the beginning of printing in England under William Caxton, who was trained in Germany, is 1475.

With the Protestant Reformation in Britain and the strong influences within it from the Reformed Church world of Geneva and Zurich, religious pictures, as for example saints’ prints, came under question. Ernest B. Gilman deals with this issue in Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (1986). He points out that images “devised by mennes phantasies” were prohibited in 1547 as downgrading Scripture, the Word of God, in devotional life. Permitted, however, were images that acted as objects of “remembraunce, whereby, men may be admonished, of the holy lifes and conversacion of theim, that the sayde Images do represent.”

Hence Bible illustrations were permitted and enjoyed by English Protestants, even by Puritans. Francis Quarles, who created the most popular emblem book in British history, used the allegorical emblem with its moral poetry attached, as “hieroglyphics” and “silent parables.” So emblems were also permitted for English Protestants. And from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, British printers produced an immense spate of illustrated broadsides—street literature—as well as the Hogarth, Cruikshank, and Rowlandson satiric prints and caricatures, for which England became famous indeed. (For the proliferation of song and ballad broadsides in Great Britain, and the solid research into their origins and history, see the Bibliographical Essay.)

The art of printing arrived in the Americas in the sixteenth century in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The first actual printing in the New World was done in Mexico in the 1530s. A century later printing arrived in New England and the other English-speaking colonies, with such productions as the Bay Psalm Book of 1639. Broadsides proliferated in New England, and they have been treated in various monographs and articles emanating from the American Antiquarian Society and other scholarly institutions of the area.

For American backgrounds to Pennsylvania German broadside production, the reader is now directed to the Middle Colonies, with Philadelphia as the leading publishing center, later overtaken by the publishing interests of New York City.

Philadelphia as a Publishing Center

From its beginnings in the 1680s, Philadelphia has been a major American publishing center. Concentrated here were the principal Quaker presses; the Presbyterian Publication Society; the American Sunday School Union, with its vast publication of children’s literature and other ephemera; the oldest continuing publishing house in the United States, J. B. Lippincott Company; the Curtis Publishing Company, with its empire of family magazines; the Farm Journal Company, with its national Farm Journal; the American Catholic Historical Society; and the Jewish Publication Society. Unfortunately, these firms and their publications have not all been researched, but I do recall a several-hundred-page volume listing and describing all the books, pamphlets, and ephemera that issued from the presses of the Presbyterian Publication Society, expressing all the interests and concerns of that national denomination in the nineteenth century.

The Philadelphia Song Broadsides

In the nineteenth century Philadelphia was a center of music publishing and also of the production of cheap song broadsides. The songs—just the words, no music—were published on half sheets, usually on cheap paper. They were issued by enterprising printing establishments like Auner, Johnson, Zieber, King, DuBree, Warren, Scroggy, and others. Most of them advertised themselves, like J. H. Johnson of No. 5 North Tenth Street, Philadelphia, as “Song Publisher, Card and Job Printer,” with the additional hint: “Cards, Circulars, Bill Heads, &c., &c., Neatly Printed.” On another Johnson broadside we learn that “Johnson has 600 different kinds of songs, call and he will give you a Catalogue of them, then you can see his large assortment.”

The subject matter of the songs ranged over many areas of American popular culture of the mid- and later nineteenth century. There were sentimental, comic, and patriotic songs among them. The Civil War brought a decided upswing in their production. There were also many dialect and ethnic numbers—Negro, Dutch (German), and Irish especially. The Irish emigrant songs were particularly poignant about the Erin left behind across the Atlantic. Some songs satirized local events, politicians, or organizations like the rival fire companies of the city.

Some of the songs were published to cash in on performances at local music venues. For example, “Hazel Dell, as sung at Jenkins’ Saloon, 7th & Chestnut Sts.,” was touted by its publisher, John L. Zieber, as “The most Popular Song of the Day!” It turns out that the Jenkins location was dignified with the name of “Concert Saloon”; another of its hits was “Maggie by My Side,” as sung there by Miss Jenny Mandeville. Another venue was the Kossuth Concert Saloon, named for the nineteenth-century Hungarian patriot, and the song “Abraham’s Daughter” was sung there by Billy Ward.

The sentimental songs often used fictitious locales, as in “Bonnie Eloise, The Belle of the Mohawk Vale”—one of Zieber’s “popular editions,” composed by W. Percival. “Peanut Gal” and “Nelly Was a Lady” used Negro dialect. There were numerous sequel songs, as for example “I Am Not Angry,” the answer to “Don’t Be Angry, Mother,” and “Willie’ll Roam No More,” the answer to “Willie, We Have Missed You.” As these examples suggest, many songs parodied the popular offerings of local “vocalists,” as the saloon singers were called. And in 1889 there was a spate of song broadsides commemorating and commiserating the Johnstown Flood, including a doleful item with the title “Oh, Conemaugh!”

These Philadelphia songs represent American popular culture in its nineteenth-century mood. This vast body of ephemera was distinctive of Philadelphia’s urban culture and enterprise. It was tangentially related to the Pennsylvania Dutch culture upstate since copies did filter into the hinterlands and were sometimes pasted into scrapbooks kept by Dutchmen.

There is, of course, a huge collection of this genre of street literature at the Library Company, which was surveyed by Edwin Wolf in his pioneering book cataloging the Library Company’s song broadsides. There is also a large deposit of these Philadelphia imprints in the Free Library and a significant number in the Roughwood Collection.

Broadside Scrapbooks

Many Pennsylvanians in the nineteenth century made scrapbooks of favorite broadsides, especially those featuring songs. There are several such books of collectanea in the Roughwood Collection. The most interesting of these is the scrapbook made by Llewellyn Hughes of Philadelphia in the 1850s and 1860s. He used a copy of Mitchell’s School Atlas, published in Philadelphia by Cowperthwait, Desilver, and Butler in 1852. He left some of the colored maps in place but literally filled the rest of the book with pasted-in Philadelphia song broadsides, many of them now rarities.

Most of these pieces include at the bottom advertisements for the publisher and his wares, as for example: “JOHN W DU BREE, CARD & JOB PRINTER, & SONG PUBLISHER, No. 1169 South Eleventh St., Phila. Printing of all descriptions executed 30 per cent less than any other Office in the city. Just published, an Illuminated edition of Volunteer Cards, Envelopes, Letter and Note Paper, &c., for sale, Wholesale and Retail.” Another Philadelphia publisher, Zieber and Company, appended the sour-grapes note: “Retailers should bear in mind that we publish all the latest comic and sentimental songs, far in advance of other publishers, who only wait until we publish them, when they cabbage the same, and, by altering them, publish them as new.”

The same scrapbook yielded a unique earlier broadside in English, an elegy entitled “To the Memory of JAMES GIFFORD, Who was Killed By the Bursting of a Cannon on the 24th, Day of December 1832, Aged 20 Years 9 Months and 10 Days at Tuckahoe, New Jersey.” It was published by Mahan and Kelly, Printers, 27 North Seventh St., Philadelphia, and recounts the gruesome details of the young man’s death. The cannon firing took place on the day before Christmas, and very probably the firing was intended as Christmas noisemaking, a custom common in the nineteenth century in the American South, in western Pennsylvania, and in other areas.

Major National Institutions for Broadside Research

Two American institutions involved in broadside collecting, out of the many scholarly libraries and historical societies in the nation, should be mentioned. First, the American Antiquarian Society, founded in 1812 by the Massachusetts publisher Isaiah Thomas (1749–1831), himself a collector of broadsides and other ephemera, has become through the decades since its founding the depository of the largest collection of early printed Americana—books, pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides. Located in Worcester in central Massachusetts, the library of the Society is constantly used by research scholars from all over the United States and Europe. Its publication, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society: A Journal of American History and Culture