Chapbook

/tʃˈapbʊk/

/tʃˈæpbʊk/

Chapbook

a small pamphlet or booklet that was popular in the 16th to 19th centuries and contained stories, ballads, poems, or religious tracts, typically sold by peddlers or booksellers

Examples

1. He wrote a chapbook of poems at age 16.

2. And she is the author of the chapbook, Chromosomory, and Whereas, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Awards.

3. If you take the chapbook romances with their tales of knights and giants and so forth, which were being published in the seventeenth century, and you marry them together with the Bible, what you end up with is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

4. Such chapbooks enjoyed massive sales and they formed also a kind of bridge between elite society and the mass of the population.