Chapbook

A chapbook is a type of small printed booklet that was a popular medium for street literature throughout early modern Europe.

Chapbooks were usually produced cheaply, illustrated with crude woodcuts and printed on a single sheet folded into 8, 12, 16, or 24 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch.

[4] Chapbooks are called Volksbuch 'people's book' in German, and as pliegos sueltos 'loose sheets' in Spanish, with the latter name referring to their method of assembly.

[5] Broadside ballads were popular songs, sold for a penny or halfpenny in the streets of towns and villages around Britain between the 16th and the early 20th centuries.

There are records from Cambridgeshire as early as in 1553 of a man offering a scurrilous ballad "maistres mass" at an alehouse, and a pedlar selling "lytle books" to people,[6] including a patcher of old clothes in 1578.

Chapbooks gradually disappeared from the mid-19th century in the face of competition from cheap newspapers and, especially in Scotland, from tract societies that regarded them as ungodly.

Chapbooks were generally aimed at buyers who did not maintain libraries, and due to their flimsy construction they rarely survive as individual items.

Chapbooks were usually between four and twenty-four pages long, and produced on rough paper with crude, frequently recycled, woodcut illustrations.

[clarification needed] In the 1520s the Oxford bookseller John Dorne noted in his day-book selling up to 190 ballads a day at a halfpenny each.

The inventory of Josiah Blare, of The Sign of the Looking Glass on London Bridge, in 1707 listed 31,000 books, plus 257 reams of printed sheets.

This facilitated wide distribution and large sales with minimum outlay, and also provided the printers with feedback about what titles were most popular.

Many jests about ignorant and greedy clergy in chapbooks were taken from The Friar and the Boy printed about 1500 by Wynkyn de Worde, and The Sackfull of News (1557).

In his Jack of Newbury, set during Henry VIII's reign, an apprentice to a broadcloth weaver takes over his business and marries his widow on his death.

Other examples from the Pepys collection include The Countryman's Counsellor, or Everyman his own Lawyer, and Sports and Pastimes, written for schoolboys, including magic tricks, like how to "fetch a shilling out of a handkerchief",[This quote needs a citation] write invisibly, make roses out of paper, snare wild duck, and make a maid-servant fart uncontrollably.

Robert Burns commented that one of the first two books he read in private was "the history of Sir William Wallace ... poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest".

One of the most popular and influential chapbooks was Richard Johnson's Seven Champions of Christendom (1596), believed to be the source for the introduction of Saint George into English folk plays.

These publications range from low-cost productions to finely produced, hand-made editions that may sell to collectors for hundreds of dollars.