While full-length gothic novels written by authors like Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe were expensive, these "Sixpenny Shockers" were affordable versions of the same stories.
[3] Gothic bluebooks lured the consumer with engravings and woodcuts on their title pages and frontispieces; these illustrations were often fearsome, with a prototypical image being that of a maiden in flight down a dark path glancing over her shoulder.
[4] Important publishers of gothic bluebooks, who often referred to the works as "pamphlets", included Thomas Tegg, Dean and Munday, Robert Harrild, and John Aliss, who each had distribution networks throughout Britain.
From autobiographies, it appears that gothic bluebooks were read by writers like Percy Shelley, Robert Southey, and Sheridan Le Fanu in their youth.
But if there should be any one ignorant enough not to know what those dear darling volumes, so designated from their covers, contain, be it known, that they are or were to be bought for sixpence, and embodied stories of haunted castles, bandits, murderers, and other grim personages – a most exciting and interesting sort of food for boys' minds.