ABSTRACT
Chapbooks are small, cheap books produced in western Europe in the early modern era. Their peak was in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the nineteenth century onward, chapbooks were gradually replaced by other popular prints, such as pulp magazines, dime novels, and graphic novels. Today the term refers mostly to modern collections of poetry. Chapbooks were small, had few pages, and contained crude illustrations. They were sold by itinerant merchants and peddlers (the so-called chapmen) at affordable prices. Their publishers, mostly family businesses, printed them in high numbers. The contents of chapbooks cover a range of possible subjects: religious, historical, criminal, or geographical stories, romantic novels, and jokes, as well as fairy tales aimed to entertain and educate their audiences. Chapbooks were an important medium for the dissemination of literacy among the population. Particularly for fairy-tale studies, chapbooks constitute a significant resource for research because they played a crucial role in the wide distribution of folk and fairy tales to rural environments in many European countries.
