Printed Broadsides in the Comenius Museum in Přerov

Abstract

The Comenius Museum in Přerov has an interesting collection of chapbooks of Moravian and Slovak provenance. In the early 1990s, it was processed in the form of a museum catalogue including photo documentation. There is no extant record of when the museum acquired this collection. The collection comprises more than two thousand items, the earliest of which come from the 18th century, the latest from the beginning of the 20th century. Most of them were published by the Škarnicl family. They include both secular broadside ballads and pilgrim songs, with religious themes being predominant. Some of them are kept loose while others have been bound into chapbooks with canvas, cloth or leather binding.