THE YOUNG MAN'S INSTRUCTIVE COMPANION 1804-10?

The Young Man's Instructive Companion is a bibliographical conundrum. Anonymous, undated, and, except for one surviving issue, without imprint, the work exists in at least five different forms. Also, two other issues that were apparently printed remain unlocated. Some of the issues were probably printed after 1810. However, the relationship of parts of the work to other items in the bibliography seems to call for an attempt here to explain the work's genesis, to distinguish between issues, and to suggest their sequence.

          The work is made up from pages originally printed for three other collections. The unlocated first issue apparently drew its music from No. 275, Solomon Howe's The Worshipper's Assistant (Northampton, 1799, 1804). Most extant copies of the later issues share eight pages with No. 274, Howe's The Farmer's Evening Entertainment (Northampton, 1804). They also share twenty pages with No. 410, The Psalm-Singer's Amusement (n.p., n.d.), and the title-page wording of the two works is almost identical. According to a note written by Clarence Brigham in the front of a copy of The Psalm-Singer's Amusement, several copies of it and The Young Man's Instructive Companion were found in the effects of John Howe (1783-1843), printer of Greenwich and Enfield, Massachusetts, who was the son of Solomon Howe. The shared pages link The Young Man's Instructive Companion with The Farmer's Evening Entertainment and The Psalm-Singer's Amusement; the additional facts link the two anonymous works to the Howe family, suggesting that the elder or younger Howe compiled both, and that the younger Howe published some if not all issues. In fact, The Farmer's Evening Entertainment carries a note on its title-page: 'copy right secur'd to the author fourteen years'; the pages from that work shared by The Young Man's Instructive Companion makes the latter an act of literary piracy if compiled by anyone other than Howe or someone to whom Howe assigned his copyright.

          The event that touched off the complicated tangle was the acquisition, apparently by Solomon or John Howe, of the engraved plates of No. 108, William Billings's The Psalm-Singer's Amusement (Boston, 1781), presumably after Billings's death in Sept. 1800. The entry on The Psalm-Singer's Amusement above explains how Billings's original was adapted for a new market. The compiler must also have perceived the appeal of a smaller, less expensive collection, and The Young Man's Instructive Companion was assembled to fill that need. As the title-page announces, 'this Book was printed at different times. Made up of pages that were also intended as the beginning of The Psalm-Singer's Amusement, and the last eight pages of The Farmer's Evening Entertainment, the work is a composite - essentially a binder's compilation rather than a printer's-and hence a most complicated item to describe.

          The close relationship between The Psalm-Singer's Amusement and The Young Man's Instructive Companion, described in the entry on the former, indicates that the shared sections were printed from the same setting of type, with minor changes. The last eight pages of The Young Man's Instructive Companion bear a similar resemblance to the last eight pages of Howe's The Farmer's Evening Entertainment. In many copies, its pages 9-16 and Howe's pages 25-32, except for the page numbers and the indexes on the last page, correspond exactly, even to irregularities in typesetting. For example, the inconsistent use of single and double bars at the ends of tunes-on page 30 (14), e.g., where AMELIA ends with a single bar and CAPE ANN with a double bar-are identical; on page 32 (16) the bar lines in the treble part of JUDEA fail to line up exactly with those in the other parts from measure 8 to the end. The copies seem to show that merely by changing page numbers and the index of The Farmer's Evening Entertainment-the last page contains three different indexes-the printer ran off music for The Young Man's Instructive Companion from the same setting of type as that used for The Farmer's Evening Entertainment.

          It is unusual to find a typographically printed segment of a music book in which most, but not all, was obviously printed at the same time. Normally, when an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century American printed music from type, he set an eight-page signature, ran off as many copies as he needed, then broke it down and set another segment. For the similar eight-page segments in The Farmer's Evening Entertainment and The Young Man's Instructive Companion, however, that procedure seems to have been changed in one of two ways. Either: 1) the compiler determined the various forms that that signature would need to take for his various books, and he employed a printer who ran off sufficient copies of each at the same time; or, 2) the compiler was able to keep that segment set in type for a period of time, and as he changed content in the earlier parts of the book, he changed the index without altering the music in any way. Neither of these possibilities can be ruled out entirely, though the latter may appeal more to common sense.

          Having shown the relationship between The Young Man's Instructive Companion and other works, and having suggested certain things about its origin and its bibliographic complications, we must now examine and describe existing copies in the entries below. A few general comments are provided to help clarify the entries.

          First, most existing copies bear a title-page note referring to 'the 16 original pages' of the work. No sixteen-page copies have been found. However, indexes on the last page list the music of two different sixteen-page issues. The assumption here is that the book was originally sixteen pages long, and the sixteen-page issues are described here as unlocated items.

          Second, extant issues show differences, some tiny and some larger, that may suggest the order in which they were printed. The primary difficulty, however, of a composite work such as this one, is that the time of the printing of any component may not help to reveal the time of its binding and public availability. Thus, the sequence of issues can only be guessed at.

          Third, at this writing, no firm date can be assigned to any issue before 1811. It seems logical to accept the title-page claim of Howe's The Farmer's Evening Entertainment that all of its music is new, and therefore to place all issues of The Young Man's Instructive Companion after July 1804, the former's preface date. Two other copies carry hints of binding dates from their covers, which are made from pages of other publications pasted together. In one binding (NcWsM), a newspaper advertisement of 31 Jan. 1810 can be seen by peeling back part of the outer cover; in another (MWA), pages from an almanac dated 1812 by cataloguer Richard Anders were used to make the cover. Neither of these dates is conclusive, for either the components of the book or the pages from which the covers are formed could have been bound years later. The final issue could not have been printed or bound until 1820 or later, since one of the printing firms mentioned in the book was not founded until that year.

          The facts presently available support no precise dating, nor do they establish priority between The Young Man's Instructive Companion and The Psalm-Singer's Amusement. Therefore a range of dates [1804-10] is proposed here for both works, and the apparent sequence of issues is indicated.