This month the text-recognition team is working through a number of religious tracts — the Cheap Repository, published in the late 1700s and early 1800s by Hazard and Marshall. While chapbooks were often sold apiece, collections were sometimes later bound by the printers and sold as a whole. In our collection, individual chapters are unbound. (You can see a professionally-bound version of the Cheap Repository, with a table of contents, from 1807 on Google Books.)

A book containing an index of titles (a meta-chapbook?), with an introduction to the printers and their aims, can be found here. In fact it’s more of a promotional piece than a finding aid, as the majority of the pages are occupied with a list of subscribers to the collection. As such, it’s an interesting document of a corporate privacy policy: it seems Facebook’s use of uploaded photos is more contested today than having one’s name and status used to endorse purchases in the 1800s.