Chap-books are little stitched tracts written for the people, and sold by chapmen, or travelling pedlars, whose representative Autolycus is so vividly brought before our eyes by Shakespeare in Winter's Tale. The literary wares of the chapman were mostly ballads or other broadsides, but he also dealt in these stitched booklets. Popular literature has naturally become scarce on account of the vicissitudes to which it is subject, and few of the older chap-books exist at the present day. Samuel Pepys collected some of considerable interest which he bound in small quarto volumes and lettered Vulgaria. Besides these he left four volumes of chap-books of a smaller size which he lettered Penny Merriments, Penny Witticisms, Penny Compliments and Penny Godlinesses. The small quarto chap-books are the descendants of the black-letter tracts of Wynkyn de Worde, Copland, and other famous printers, and were probably bought from booksellers as well as from chapmen. With the 18th century came in a much inferior class of literature, which was printed in a smaller size, and forms the bulk of what is known to us now in collections of chap-books. These tracts were printed largely in Aldermary Churchyard, and afterwards in Bow Churchyard, as well as at Northampton, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Stokesley, Warrington, Liverpool, Banbury, Aylesbury, Durham, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Whitehaven, Carlisle, Worcester, Penrith, Cirencester, &c., in England; at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Falkirk, Paisley, Dumfries, Kilmarnock, Stirling, &c., in Scotland; and at Dublin. As ballads are frequently reduced versions of romances, so chap-books usually contain vulgarised versions of popular stories. The subjects of the chap-books are very various; first and foremost are the popular tales, such as Valentine and Orson, Fortunatus, Reynard the Fox, Jack and the Giants, Patient Grissel, Tom Thumb, and Tom Hickathrift; then come the lives of heroes, historical abridgments, travels, religious treatises, and abstracts of popular books like Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. Besides these there are the more modern inventions of hack writers. Dougal Graham (1724-1779), bellman to the city of Glasgow, was a popular writer who is supposed to have done much to give a special character to Scottish chap-book literature. Motherwell has styled him 'the vulgar Juvenal of his age.' His works were reprinted at Glasgow in 2 vols. in 1883.
The chap-books of the 17th century are valuable as illustrations of manners; but little is to be learned from those of the 18th century, which are altogether of an inferior character. An instance of this may be taken from the story of Dick Whittington. The earliest version of this tale which has come down to us is a small quarto tract entitled 'The Famous and Remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington, three times Lord Mayor of London, who lived in the time of King Henry the Fifth in the year 1419, with all the remarkable passages, and things of note, which happened in his time: with his Life and Death.' It is without a date, but was probably published about 1670. In this the historical character of the subject is fairly kept up, although the dates are somewhat mixed, and to this the widespread folk-tale of the cat is added. In the later chap-book versions the historical incidents are ruthlessly cut down, and the fictitious ones amplified. The three chief points of the story are (1) the poor parentage of the hero, (2) his change of mind at Highgate Hill by reason of hearing Bow Bells, and (3) his good fortune arising from the sale of his cat. Now these are all equally untrue as referring to the historical Whittington, and the second is apparently an invention of the 18th century. In the 17th-century story we learn that Whittington set out before daybreak on All-Hallows' Day, and before he got as far as Bunhill he heard Bow Bells ring out. Holloway replaced Bunhill in the later versions, and hence arose the myth connected with Whittington Stone on Highgate Hill.
Hannah More's Repository Tracts, and afterwards the publications of the Useful Knowledge Society, Chambers's Miscellany of Tracts, and the growth of cheap magazines, greatly reduced the popularity of chap-books; but Catnach, a London printer, kept up the supply in the early portion of the 19th century, and even now chap-books are still produced in England and elsewhere.
The influence of chap-books can never have been very great in Britain from the inferiority of their literary character. This has not been the case in other countries, and Mr Wentworth Webster has discovered the curious fact that the Pastorales or Basque dramas owe their origin to the chap-books hawked about the country (see article BASQUES). A valuable and standard work on the chap-books of France was published in 1854, entitled Histoire des Livres Populaires, ou de la Littérature du Colportage, by M. Ch. Nisard; but little has been done in England for this class of literature. Mr J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps printed in 1849 Notices of Fugitive Tracts and Chap Books and Descriptive Notices of Popular English Histories; Mr John Ashton published in 1882 a useful work on Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century; and five of the most interesting of the old chap-books have been reprinted (1885) by the Villon Society, with introductions by Mr Gomme and Mr H. B. Wheatley. For German chap-books, the reader should consult Karl Simrock, Die deutschen Volksbücher (55 parts, Berlin and Frankfurt, 1839-67), and Gotthard Oswald Marbach, Altdutsche Volksbücher (44 vols. Leipzig, 1838-47).