“The humblest literature—chapbooks, cheap abbreviated novels, almanacs and ballads—could be bought from itinerant pedlars and chapmen who travelled the coutryside selling reading matter, trinkets, gifts, household goods and toys. Inside his heavy pack the chapman carried traditional stories, first widely printed in the sixteenth century, moral tales with such forbidding titles as The Drunkard’s Legacy and Youth’s Warning Piece, joke and riddle books like Joaks upon Joaks, and severely abbreviated versions of such novels as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. . . . These slim, small volumes, often printed execrably, were popular staples among all classes. What they lacked in substance they made up in good value: their greatest virtue was that they were cheap.

Itinerant salesmen carried only these sorts of book because any others would have been too bulky or heavy for them. But in the bookshops these small or penny “histories” shared the shelves with books of every size—from slim duodecimos (one twelfth the size of a printing sheet), octavos (an eighth of a sheet), quartos (a quarter of a sheet) to large folios (the size of a sheet with a single fold).”

—John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.