All of these chapbooks are in library collections. The largest collection is at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the University of Virginia. The Gothic Unbound also contains images of chapbooks from The New York Public Library and The British Library. Whenever possible I also photograph the call number and location at the beginning of each text. In some cases, the library (or a previous owner) has bound several chapbooks together in a volume, so they don't have individual library call numbers. Contact me if you need help finding them.

Sure, but it is neither comfortable nor easy to do so. The next phase of this project involves creating TEI encoded e-book editions, which will be much easier on the eyes.  

These photos were made in library special collections reading rooms where flash photography is not allowed. Chapbooks are also difficult to handle and set up for photos; my fingers are often in the frames because there was simply no other way to hold them open without causing damage. At the same time, I touched them as little as possible to prevent damage; when possible, I used cloth weights and 'snakes' to hold pages down.

Some chapbooks are very difficult to open because they have been disbound. This means that the original people who bought the chapbooks paid a binder to trim, stitch, and glue their collection of chapbooks into a hard binding, but later, someone split that book back into pieces for resale. In these cases, pieces of the aftermarket binding prevent the chapbook from laying down to be read. The disbound chapbooks also have extremely narrow margins because they have been trimmed to match a larger volume. For this reason, it is very difficult to prop chapbooks open without covering some of the text.

Close-ups of the illustrations were made using a 10x loupe between the camera lens and the page, since larger camera apparatuses are not allowed in most libraries.

Dark blotches on the pages are the result of the aging process of badly-made paper, and the ink is sometimes brownish because it was poor quality, and has broken down over time. Chapbooks are ephemeral in nature; they were never meant to last 200 years.     

Most of them are about 5 inches by 7 inches, but they vary because they were often trimmed after purchase to be bound with other chapbooks. Ann Lemoine also published tiny chapbooks, which are only about 3 inches by 5 inches. For an example of a tiny chapbook, see Roxalana.

When color appears on the page in this collection, it was added by hand after the printing press ink had dried. Patrons paid an extra penny to have the illustrations colored. According to Terry Belanger of the Rare Book School, it is likely that these were colored by children, who were plentiful and underfoot.

The frontispieces of these chapbooks were printed separately from the rest of the chapbook using a different type of press. The image was engraved into a metal plate, and then ink was carefully wiped into the grooves of the engraving. Slightly damp paper was placed over the plate, then a thick layer of felt was laid on top, creating a type of sandwich with the plate on the bottom, then the paper, then the felt. This entire 'sandwich' was then pressed under extreme pressure using a roller press. The ink was forced up from the plate's grooves and into the paper. The paper then hangs to dry. This process is called intaglio printing. 

Some are anonymous, but most are signed. You can find their names in the bottom corners of the illustration. The person addressed as "sc" or "scr" is the one who scratched the image into the plate. The person addressed as "del" is the draftsman who originally drew the image. Both are master craftsmen. For more information on these addresses, see Ad Stejnman's helpful guide.

The next phase of this project is to transcribe these chapbooks in plain text. If you can type a page or two of a chapbook while you read, please email the results to wendy.fall@gothicunbound.com. I would be delighted to add them to this site, since I deeply regret that the images as uploaded are not accessible to text reading software used by people with visual impairments.

Most of these chapbooks are anonymous, for many possible reasons. First and foremost, authors of chapbooks didn't have copyright protection or contracts to protect their livelihoods in this period. This meant that the publisher was under no obligation to typeset the author's name, and often simply refrained from doing so. Title page material was meant to help the reader follow the series through the auspices of the publisher and seller. The author's name would only be included if their reputation would potentially increase sales. One example of this is Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson, who was a prolific chapbooker, and there is ample historical evidence of her existence and authorship. Wilkinson is a rare example, however. Many named authors of chapbooks are clearly pseudonyms, and still others credit a famous novelist who almost certainly had nothing do do with the chapbook beyond inspiring a redaction or influencing the author. All of these machinations aside, many chapbooks were written by authors on the very lowest economic rungs of London. They couldn't afford to get a reputation for writing trashy chapbooks if they had any hope of also earning money by teaching or publishing in more respectable outlets. When writing letters to the Literary Fund Society asking for emergency financial assistance, these authors would emphasize any hard bound publications they could boast, and argue for the moral nature of their 'pamphlets', particularly those written for children (NOT gothic chapbooks). For an example of this, see the British Library's Manuscript Collection, No. 375 Vol. 10, in which Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson clearly emphasizes her (failed) attempts to become a teacher rather than her very successful chapbooking career. Wilkinson was a single woman supporting her daughter, and struggled with a cancer; she amply demonstrates the difficulty of making a living writing chapbooks, since she was extremely prolific despite her illness and still couldn't make ends meet. Finally, the last possible reason we don't know who wrote the chapbooks is that the people who wrote them didn't consider themselves writers or authors. There simply wasn't enough money in writing chapbooks to make a steady living, so many people who wrote them probably had other jobs. It's possible that the anonymous chapbooks are the creations of printers, their apprentices, or publishers. They could be side-hustles for women at home with their children; literacy was on the rise among even the lowest classes in London. They could have been written by anyone with some free time and some writing supplies.