On Chapbooks

These were cheaply-produced works, usually no more than 24 pages and typically either 8” x 10” or 5” x 7 3/8”, often intended for middle and lower-class audiences who could not afford the price of a normal book. Topics were typically of popular interest — ballads, religion, folktales, poems, news items, etc. They were frequently illustrated, albeit crudely, and printers often reused the woodcuts from other books or chapbooks, sometimes with little regard for their relation to the subject matter.   They were generally sold not by booksellers but rather by peddlers or itinerant merchants; those who specialized in their sale were called “chapmen”. Unlike scripture and longer printed works, chapbooks were considered ephemeral goods at best, and their pages would routinely be torn out and reused for other purposes—as a wrapping, an aid in lighting a pipe, as a scrap to jot down a note, or even kept in the privy. Because of this, and despite the numbers they were produced in, few have survived into the modern era intact.