Why it matters

Robin Hood garlands were the main vehicle by which the outlaw legend circulated among ordinary eighteenth-century readers — cheap, woodcut-illustrated ballad anthologies rather than literary editions, and they were among the larger and costlier garlands, running to roughly sixteen to twenty-seven tales. The imprint points to the Dicey family operation, the dominant English producer of cheap print in this period, which ran the Bow Church-yard press in London alongside a warehouse in Northampton under Cluer Dicey. The seller (Quaint Book Shop) cites ESTC N13332 and states that the English Short Title Catalogue locates only two known copies of this edition worldwide — one at the Bodleian Library (Oxford) and one at UCLA, with the UCLA copy specifically cross-referenced to WorldCat OCLC 15584159.

Why we're looking

Survival of a stitched, unrebound ballad garland in its original wrapper with contemporary manuscript notes is the sort of ephemeral-survival object that rarely reaches the market in this state, and the dealer's ESTC citation (their claim, not independently confirmed here) would make it very uncommon institutionally. No directly comparable eighteenth-century Dicey Garland with a firm price turned up in search, so relative value at $450 is unconfirmed — this is a candidate on object interest, not on a demonstrated discount. If validated, this specific 1760 Dicey printing would be an extraordinarily scarce survival — not because the content is rare (Robin Hood ballad collections were genuinely popular and saw roughly 30 editions from at least 13 printers between 1663 and 1760, per the same dealer's own notes), but because this particular cheap, disposable chapbook printing happens to have almost entirely vanished, which is common for this kind of ephemeral popular literature.

Watch out for

The rarity claim, the 1760 date, and the ESTC/OCLC numbers all come from the dealer's own description and were not confirmed against ESTC directly — catalogue records for garlands with this title wording carry the year in brackets, i.e. inferred rather than printed on the book, so ask whether the title page actually bears a date. The AbeBooks "First Edition" flag contradicts the dealer's own text, which places the first printing with Gilbertson in 1663 and this among roughly thirty later editions. Also worth pinning down: whether the eight colored woodcuts were colored at the time or later, the extent of the two tears on the final leaf, and confirmation that the collation is complete, since stitched garlands very often lack leaves.