Ballad Facsimiles

Ballad facsimiles are digital approximations of what the original printed ballads would have looked like when they originally came off the press. They are created by the EBBA team in Adobe Photoshop from raw TIFFs of individual, usually trimmed ballads or—as is more often the case—of the album page(s) onto which the broadside ballads had been pasted by collector(s); see Images and Album Facsimiles. When a ballad sheet has been trimmed, as is typical, we recreate an outer border. When the ballad sheet has not only been trimmed but also pasted onto an album page, we trim away the album page before recreating a border around the ballad sheet.

Sample Ballad Facsimile

For the cut apart ballads, we also put the two parts of the ballad back together and provide an inner margin dividing the two parts. In determining the size of the borders and inner margins, we surveyed 23 uncut, two-part ballads: 10 from the Pepys ballads and 13 from the Wood ballads (Wood 401) at the Bodleian Library. What we found was that both outer margins and inner divides between two-part ballads varied enormously. The space between the two parts of the uncut ballads, for instance, could be as small as 2 mm and as large as 51 mm. Given the wide range of variation, we decided on an artificial standard for the outer margin of 10 mm and for the inner margin or divide between two parts of 20 mm. These proportions were chosen in order to give the viewer a sense of the ballad as an independent, whole sheet without creating too much white space when the ballad is viewed in large sizes in EBBA.