"'We boast that we beat the world in the manufacture of cheap goods', wrote a Victorian newspaperman, after spending Bank Holiday at the Crystal Palace, 'it would be no less true to boast that we beat the world in the manufacture of cheap amusements'."

So starts the Foreword by Raphael Samuel. According to the Foreword:

"Sally Alexander was an actress before coming to Ruskin in 1968. She has brought her own experience to her work. It is charged with a sympathetic understanding of the fairground, as it is today and as it was in the times she is writing about. She has found her best material neither in the libraries nor in the archives, though they have provided her with valuable sources, but on the road, talking to the families of the travelling showmen."

Chapter titles are: The 'New' Fair; Market Aspects of the Fair; The Peoples Holiday; The Industrial Revolution and St. Giles's Fair; and Dissolving Views. The booklet is mainly text, but does have some photographs, including Boxing Booth 1898, Studt's Bioscope 1907 and Day's Menagerie 1895.

Condition: Very good. (Small pen mark to bottom of front cover).