The two books NSP1 and the Charlton Memorial book are a good overview of the repertoire - what people actually played - as seen in the mid-20th century.
The Peacock collection does the same job for the beginning of the 19th, and so contains a higher proportion of purpose-built smallpipe tunes. If you can find a copy, Matt's edition of Bewick's MS does a similar job for a couple of decades after Peacock, so more aimed at keyed rather than keyless chanters. There is a fair proportion of tunes imported from Scotland - judging from the Vickers fiddle book, this has always been the case so near the border. But many sit well on the smallpipes. Some of the imported and recently composed tunes in the later books NSP2 and 3 don't suit the pipes so well, not really needing drones at all. I would advise beginners to start with NSP1 and Charlton, then graduate to the Peacock tunes early on. Besides being excellent music, they are also the best tunes for learning a precise technique. John -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
