Pirates
The new Pirate series Black Sails is set to premiere on the Starz cable network tomorrow night (though I’ve just now noticed that the first episode is already available On Demand). In honor of that (or maybe just as an excuse to show this material), I’ve extracted roughly half of the “Pirate” pages from the early 1850s paperback book, The Little Joker’s Amusing Panorama, published by Fisher & Brother.
Little Joker is part of a small group of early 1850s American paperback titles – all of them quite rare – in which publishers gathered and re-used the material found in their prior two decades worth of comic almanacs. (The Clown, or The Banquet of Wit, which I posted examples from earlier this month, is another such book.) In the case of Little Joker, the majority of its pages are reprinting material first published in the Davy Crockett Almanacs, filled out with pages from the (President William Henry) Harrison Almanac, at least one Comic Almanac, and – I am guessing – from the Pirate-themed Almanacs (unless there was a large abundance of pirate material inside the Crockett Almanacs that I’m unaware of).
I am taking guesses here, because the Crockett and Pirate almanacs are quite scarce and in demand, and so are extremely expensive. I own very little of that material. Little Joker, however, is rarer than all of them, so much so that it has remained virtually unknown, and so it slipped under the radar of Crockett and Pirate collectors when it came up for sale, years ago. (I’ve yet to see another copy for sale, while Crockett Almanacs pop up repeatedly.)
Anyway, following beneath are a number of pirate bios, from a time when these characters were within many readers’ living memory.
Click on the above & below pages, to view them in greater in detail, and be to read the text.
I’ll end this post with a few pages that came directly from Crockett Almanacs — 1842 (above) and 1839 (below) — taken from pictures that were posted when they were up for auction. I have a bunch more such pictures saved elsewhere – I’ll just have to save them for the next worthy Pirate event.
— Doug
