The Otley Y. J. S. Chapbooks, A Critical Edition

The L. Tom Perry Special Collections in the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU contains a collection of sixteen small, yellow chapbooks, each with eight pages of text and hand-colored woodcut illustrations. The titles in this series range from well-known and well-loved tales such as “The History of Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Jack the Giant Killer,” to less familiar “Capitals of Europe,” “The History of Peter Brown,” and “The Old Man and his Ass.” These chapbooks are unattributed and undated, bearing only a notice that they were “printed for the booksellers” by the Yorkshire J. S. Publishing & Stationery Co., in Otley, England. What was the Yorkshire J. S. Publishing company, who wrote and printed these chapbooks, why, and when? These are just some of the questions that Jamie Horrocks’s English 340 class undertook to discover in Winter of 2025. We present our findings in this Critical Edition of the Otley Y. J. S. chapbooks in BYU’s collection, which offers research on British chapbooks in the nineteenth century, the history of printing in Otley, the Y. J. S. Publishing company and its rivals, as well as on thirteen of the sixteen chapbooks themselves.