‘What Age ever brought forth more, or bought more Printed Waste Paper?’ In 1681 the pamphleteer who posed this question was struck by the extraordinary success of the cheap print trade in Restoration England – and he was not alone. Historians have confirmed his perception that the years 1660–1700 saw a huge explosion in the levels of production, distribution and consumption of ballads, chapbooks, almanacs, pamphlets and other products of the rich and varied marketplace of cheap print. In the 1660s almanacs sold at an annual rate of between 300,000 and 400,000 copies and an estimated 90,000 chapbooks were purchased in 1664 alone. This revolution in communications was characterized by the sheer volume, variety, distribution and affordability of print. The work of Bernard Capp, Mark Knights and Angela McShane Jones has done much to illuminate this watershed in the early modern print industry. From the 1660s onwards the marketplace of cheap print had never been more sophisticated or so accessible to so many people.

Bernard Capp and Margaret Spufford first demonstrated the importance of ballads, chapbooks, almanacs and jestbooks for tracing the evolution of popular belief, and these initial insights have been enhanced in recent years by important contributions from Tessa Watt, Alexandra Walsham and Peter Lake, who have outlined the complexity of the cheap print market, its modes of distribution and the extent of its impact on wider society. Nonetheless, the Restoration marketplace of cheap print remains relatively unstudied. Those historians that have focused on these years have generally utilized these sources to gauge popular political involvement during the English civil war and the events of 1688. To date, no work has analysed the relationship between cheap print and ghost beliefs.

In this chapter I want to describe how ghost stories also benefited from this thriving industry. My own statistics suggest that the years 1660–1700 saw the production of 42 per cent of all original chapbook and ballad accounts featuring ghosts published in England between 1660 and 1800. Chapbooks devoted to the life of Guy of Warwick and ballads describing the adventures of Robin Hood were perennial favourites, and ghost stories similarly commanded a strong market value.