James Catnach was an Alnwick-born printer and publisher of the early 19th century. He became a major publisher of chapbooks in the Seven Dials district of London.
In early modern Europe, a chapbook was a type of printed street literature. Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered booklets, usually printed on a single sheet folded into books of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages. They were often illustrated with crude woodcuts, which sometimes bore no relation to the text, and were often read aloud to an audience. When illustrations were included in chapbooks, they were considered popular prints.
