A chapbook is a type of small printed booklet that was 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. Printers provided chapbooks on credit to chapmen, who sold them both from door to door and at markets and fairs, then paying for the stock they sold. The tradition of chapbooks emerged during the 16th century as printed books were becoming affordable, with the medium ultimately reaching its height of popularity during the 17th and 18th centuries. Different ephemera and popular or folk literature were published as chapbooks, such as almanacs, children's literature, folklore, ballads, nursery rhymes, pamphlets, poetry, and political and religious tracts. The term chapbook remains in use by publishers to refer to short, inexpensive booklets.
The frontispiece of a late 18th-century chapbook edition of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, depicting Jean Calas being broken on the wheel
The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer
A modern chapbook
Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader, from picture books for the very young to young adult fiction.
A mother reads to her children, depicted by Jessie Willcox Smith in a cover illustration of a volume of fairy tales written in the mid to late 19th century.
The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) is a canonical piece of children's literature and one of the best-selling books ever published.
Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, originally published in 1744
A woodcut of the eponymous Goody Two-Shoes from the 1768 edition of The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes. It was first published in London in 1765.