His poems and songs circulated among his contemporaries through many channels, not only in the well-known early editions in book form, but also in manuscripts and letters, through oral transmission, in newspapers, in song, in formal musical publication, and through extended quotation in reviews. Among all these formats, however, chapbooks (the small pamphlets sold at markets and hawked from farm to farm by traveling chapmen in backpacks) have the best claim to be the literature of ordinary folk and a major route through which Burns was encountered by ordinary people.

This collection comprises full digital facsimiles of all chapbooks from the G. Ross Roy Collection, up through 1830, that contain one or more poems or songs by Robert Burns.