In praise of old-fashioned, un-notated hymnals: I am lucky to own my grandfather's pocket-sized hymnal from 1916 (which was, I believe, outdated even when he became a priest in the Episcopal church). It has no music in it. Only words.

I'm not aware of any hymnals like these being made anymore. Not sure what the numbers are for 17th-20th c., but I know that for the 16th century, recent estimates are that German Protestants produced around 2 million hymnals and about half of them had music and half did not.

Another feature of early Lutheran hymnody is comparatively how few hymns they sang. A lot of hymnals today have upwards of 400 hymns. Mainly mainline hymnals have over 600. Many of the earliest hymnals had far, far fewer. We just have to admit that we have too many hymns now.

Too many parties are being accommodated in modern hymnals. Too many sentimental associations, too many denominational traditions. Bloat. If I had to make a guess (purely a guess!), I'd bet hymnal bloat came about simultaneously with the demise of the non-notated pocket hymnal.

The non-notated hymnal serves an important purpose. It means that if you don't have the melody memorized, you can't sing it. I think that's a good rule of thumb, for lots of reasons. (1) Singing in church should *not* be dependent on your ability to read music.

(2) Having melodies memorized makes you sing louder and off the book. Any choir director would tell you that. (3) If your brainspace is at stake, you have higher aesthetic standards. The melodies that stick are the brilliant heuristic ones designed for congregational singing.

[(3a) This also holds your church musicians to a higher standard. They can't introduce new random crap to you all the time. There's a higher adoption cost, and that's holding them to a good standard too.]

(4) The non-notated hymnal drives your aesthetic standards up for the *text* of the hymn. Once you're reminded that a hymn has to be good poetry, not just good "hymn" text, you get fed up with sentimental bullshit or careless prosody or clichés.

(5) You can carry the non-notated hymnal around with you and it can become a devotional practice. This is infeasible with the notated music in it. But not so with pocket-sized hymnals. Another feature of 16th c Lutheran Germany: they had as many or more hymnals than prayer books.

Finally, going back briefly to the "there are too many hymns now" question, I would just say that the early Calvinists are often made fun of for their perfectly implausible idea of learning and singing different tunes for each of the Psalms, but there are only 150 of them.

If you're in a traditional or mainline church that sings hymns, you already sing and know more than 150 hymns on a regular basis. Hymns, at a certain point, just become cheap excuses to not sing psalms, which are embarrassingly historically particularized, Biblical, & specific.

Anyways, the non-notated hymnal can drive down the number of hymn we sing regularly and we can free up brainspace for the important activity of singing psalms.

(For the early Lutheran hymnal, see Christopher Boyd Brown, "Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation" HUP which begins with a great quote by a Jesuit in 1620 that Luther had destroyed more souls with hymnals than with all his writing and preaching.)