Broad-Sheet Ballads. Being A Collection Of Irish Popular Songs. Frontispiece by Jack B. Yeats. Dublin: Maunsel, [1913]. First Edition. Pp xvi, 71. Green cloth boards titled in gilt. Cloth scuffed & rubbed, lower portion of page 3, torn out, with the finial stanza of the printed poem replaced in facsimile; contents pages in good condition. Frontispiece by Jack B. Yeats.

Presentation Copy, Inscribed by the Author to Harry Sinclair on front free endpaper.

In his 16-page introduction, Colum differentiates these “street songs” about a specific event from “songs of the countryside”. The songs in this collection have been popular in the English-speaking parts of Ireland “for the past 100 years“.

Harry Sinclair was a half-Jewish Dublin antiques dealer who was a significant figure in the city’s artistic and intellectual life. He was an associate of Padraic Colum and was a friend and significant influence on a young Samuel Beckett.

Sinclair is most famously known for a major libel case in 1937, where he sued the writer Oliver St. John Gogarty. The case was a significant Dublin event, with one observer noting it could only be captured by a work like ‘The Pickwick Papers’ rewritten by James Joyce