The Royal Alphabet, page 3.

Two hundred years ago these tiny, affordable, and ephemeral chapbooks were created for children to learn their ABCs and progress on their journey of reading. This exhibit showcases three early nineteenth-century Scottish children's chapbooks: A New Lottery Book, The Royal Alphabet, and The Rise of Learning. They were published in Edinburgh, Scotland between 1815 and 1819.

Why the term chapbook?

The term is derived from the word chapman – the itinerate peddler who sold these booklets across the countryside, at farms, fairs, and villages. “Chap” originated as the word “ceap” which is an Old English word for trade. The booklets would have been sold or traded by the chapman.

These tiny chapbooks can be described as small booklets formed from a single sheet of paper that has been printed on both sides. The paper is then folded several times to create a booklet of 24 to 48 pages. These chapbooks are about the size of a playing card and are stitched to keep the pages together. In the creation of a chapbook, production costs were kept to a minimum by reusing the woodblocks that created the illustrations, and by using poor quality ink and paper. Since chapbooks were cheaply produced they deteriorated quickly, quickly becoming ephemeral.