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John L Flood, Zürcher Liedflugschriften. Katalog der bis 1650 erschienenen Drucke in der Zentralbibliothek Zürich. Comp. by Eberhard Nehlsen, The Library, Volume 23, Issue 1, March 2022, Pages 113–115, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/22.3.113
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Extract
For many years Eberhard Nehlsen has devoted virtually every spare moment to doggedly tracking down and describing the thousands of printed song booklets issued in early modern Germany. In the English-speaking world these things are often called ‘broadside ballads’ but such terminology is generally inappropriate when applied to the German material: very few of the German examples are ‘broadsides’ and few of them are ‘ballads’. In Germany, largely thanks to the work of Rolf Wilhelm Brednich in Die Liedpublizistik im Flugblatt des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts (Baden-Baden, 1974–75) and to Eberhard Nehlsen’s own Berliner Liedflugschriften (Baden-Baden, 2008–9), it has become customary to employ the terms Liedflugblatt for the broadsides and Liedflugschrift for the ubiquitous song-booklets (notwithstanding the fact that Flugschrift ‘pamphlet’ tends to imply a polemical intention which, however, is only rarely a characteristic of the songs they contain). The overwhelming majority of these Liedflugschriften are small octavo booklets (approximately 89% of those in the Zürich Zentralbibliothek) of eight, twelve, or sixteen leaves containing the words of one or more religious or secular songs. These were generally sold at markets or fairs or hawked from door to door by itinerant booksellers or their agents. Nehlsen’s three-volume Berliner Liedflugschriften described 2,298 pre-1650 examples of such material in the State Library in Berlin, and now he has produced a similar catalogue of the holdings (577 items) in the Zentralbibliothek at Zürich. These two catalogues (henceforth referred to as BLF and ZLF respectively), important though they both are, are however only an interim measure: Nehlsen’s ultimate aim is to produce a comprehensive catalogue, projected to run to about ten volumes, recording all the surviving printed booklets of German songs from the years 1501 to 1650 (currently estimated to number around 9,000 editions). While the booklets held in major libraries such as Berlin State Library, Zürich, the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel, the Austrian National Library, the British Library, and many others have of course been catalogued (though not much studied), other examples still regularly come to light in smaller collections, municipal archives, the stock of antiquarian booksellers and the private libraries of individual collectors.
