c. 1896 "The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Songster" Colorful highly Illustrated Promotional Songster Booklet with Chromolithographed Covers, 32 pages, Complete, Fine.
This scarce promotional songster was issued by the Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth and features a brilliantly chromolithograph front and back covers depicting portrait medallions of P.T. Barnum and James A. Bailey flanked by banners reading "Greatest Show on Earth," above a lively scene of clowns, jesters, and circus performers in vivid reds, greens, yellows, and blues. The back cover is equally striking, presenting a spectacular chromolithographer scene of seventy performing horses in a single act, billed as "the only performance of the kind in the world," with $10,000 worth of horses in rich trappings. Circus songsters of this type were distributed to audiences as promotional keepsakes, containing popular song lyrics associated with the show and serving as souvenirs of the performance; they are primary documents of American popular entertainment culture of the Gilded Age. Measures about 6.5 x 4.5 inches., vivid colors, some small tape reinforcement on the blank in side back cover and wear from use on the spine.
"Songsters" were small promotional pamphlets that circuses (and other traveling shows, minstrel troupes, and product brands) gave away or sold cheaply at performances. They contained the lyrics (not sheet music) to popular songs of the day, often loosely tied to the show, with the cover serving as the real advertisement. Barnum & Bailey's version, printed under titles like "The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Songster," used a chromolithographed (color-printed) illustrated wrapper, typically showing circus imagery, Barnum and Bailey portraits, clowns, elephants, or performers printed by firms like the Strobridge Lithographing Co. of Cincinnati, who did most of B&B's poster and print work in this era.

A typical surviving example is a paperback pamphlet of around 32 unnumbered pages with 2 pages of ads in the rear, original illustrated wrappers, and colored borders and hand coloring to the front-wrap engraving.