Hey, Sminky! It's great that you found this cool songbook and it's great that you want to post the songs at Mudcat (that is, assuming they haven't been posted before—I haven't checked) but I have a suggestion that might save you some work, especially if you are typing this stuff out by hand.

"Gaskel's Comic Song Book" isn't available online, but a lot of other songbooks are, and some of the songs in "Gaskel's Comic Song Book" may be available in other books.

For instance, I found GRIST THE MILLER in Mirth and Metre: by C. Dibdin, Jun. (London: Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, 1807), page 195.

Can you see that poem? (Click the link.) We've heard that some books that can be seen in the US can't be seen in the UK, because Google interprets copyright laws differently for different countries.

If you can see it, you can probably copy and paste it. First you've got to click the link on that page that says "Plain text." Then it will bring up, instead of a page image, a page that consists of text that has already been processed by an OCR (Optical Character Reader) and converted to editable text. The OCR will introduce some errors, however, so if you want your copied text to be 100% correct, and formatted nicely, you will need to proofread it and make corrections.

Anyway, that's easier (usually) than typing the whole thing from scratch.

On the other hand, if you have your own scanner and OCR program, you might be doing this already.

So basically my suggestion is: before you type song lyrics, check and see if it's in another book that you can copy and paste from.

Or, you might want to concentrate your effort on songs that are NOT in any other songbook.

Whatever you do, thanks for all the effort you are putting in.