Little Pamphlets and Story Books

Chapter 10 charts the development of the little pamphlets and booklets printed in early modern Scotland. Most were produced from single sheets of paper and sometimes from half-sheets. They contained works of edification, instruction, and entertainment. Some of these ‘story books’ were reprinted from the English market and others were of Scottish provenance; some were in verse and others in prose. Their contents included sermons, godly tales, and collections of songs or ‘garlands’, together with compilations of humorous anecdotes and jests. During the eighteenth century these small tracts became one of the most popular forms of reading matter and they remained so into the nineteenth century, when they first came to be known in Scotland as ‘chapbooks’.