A history of chapbooks

Chris Morton on chapbooks: "They were waistcoat pocket-sized, very cheap, crudely made and definitively coverless. Usually just a single sheet of rag paper - printed on both sides, folded and simply stitched to make 8, 12 or 16 little pages - the outside ones thus doubled as their own book cover. They were usually incongruously illustrated with splendid impartiality using recycled woodcuts. For our pre-printing, oral culture the advent of these "small merry books" in the 1500s literally "made the word flesh" ... they were the only form of - and format for - literature."