What are chapbooks?
A woodcut image from: The history of Mother Bunch of the west 
Title page from chapbook with woodcut illustration featuring Ally Croaker and gentlemanChapbooks are small books or pamphlets measuring about 15 x 10 cm.
They are produced from inexpensive and low-quality paper that often has a noticeable texture which can be sometimes be exposed when ink bleeds through to the facing page. This process is in evidence in the chapbook image reproduced to the right.
Chapbooks were usually printed on a single sheet of paper, folded into either 8, 12, 16 or 24 pages.
Popular between the 16th and 19th centuries, folk tales, ballads, religious tracts, and other forms of entertainment were bound together to make a chapbook, or as they were sometimes called, a penny history.
While chapbooks are not very well known in a modern context, they played a significant role in the evolution of the period’s popular culture and it can be argued that popular culture became synonymous with chapbooks, as the increased number of purchases made in the 18th and 19th centuries reflects the interests of the masses.
In this exhibition
- Introduction
- What are chapbooks?
- Who sold and printed chapbooks?
- Chapbook readership
- Woodcut illustrations
- Women and 18th century print
- Female representations in chapbooks
- Further contexts
- Select bibliography