Gothic Chapbooks & Bluebooks



Gothic chapbooks, and the related format of popular literature called "bluebooks" (for their cheap blue paper covers), were small, inexpensive, and often crudely printed Gothic tales frequently sold by travelling peddlars, or "chapmen." These works, targeted to a relatively unsophisticated reading (and listening) audience — although their popularity often reached beyond that target audience — were often knock-offs of popular full-scale Gothic novels or plagiarized episodes from popular Gothic novels of the day, although some were original compositions. Chapboooks — typically smaller and shorter in length than bluebooks — were most popular in the last decades of the C18, while bluebooks were published and circulated widely in the first couple of decades of the C19.


Online Chapbook Resources:

A checklist of over 200 Gothic chapbooks is contained in Angela Koch's essay "'The Absolute Horror of Horrors' Revised: A Bibliographical Checklist of Early-Nineteenth-Century Gothic Bluebooks" [Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text (2002)].

For more on Gothic chapbooks, see Franz Potter's "Trade Gothic" page. Potter also runs Zittaw Press,this link opens a new window a publishing house devoted to reproducing these works.

There is also some discussion of chapbooks in Frederick S. Frank's "Gothic Gold: the Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Fiction", which discusses the Sadleir-Black collection of Gothic literature now housed at the UVa LIbrary. An appendix to this essay includes a large number of illustrations from chapbooks, and is a must-see for Gothic fans.

A serious scholarly discussion of chapbooks may be found in "Gothic Bluebooks in the Princely Library of Corvey and Beyond" by Angela Koch, in the online journal Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text.

The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the U of South Carolina has an online exhibit entitled "The Scottish Chapbook Project," which also features an excellent and substantive essay "What is a Chapbook?". This site also features a bibliography and more discussion (of a bibliographic nature) of chapbooks. Highly recommended. 		  click for info from amazon.com
click the cover image for more info from Amazon.com


The Cornell Library's online exhibit "Paper, Leather, Clay and Stone: The Written Word Materialized" also has a brief note on chapbooks.


Chapbooks available online:

Anonymous, The Mysterious Spaniard; or, the Ruins of St. Luke's Abbey
Sarah Wilkinson: The Child of Mystery. The Spectre; or, the Ruin of Belfont Priory. The Castle Spectre: An Ancient Baronial Romance



"Gothic Chapbooks."