These chapbooks exemplify the type of material sold by chapmen-peddlers or itinerant merchants who traveled from place to place hawking their wares. Some of these vendors included books among their varied inventory. Others sold books exclusively. Small, lightweight, and cheap, chapbooks were immensely popular. By the nineteenth century, some were even sold with color illustrations. However, unlike hand-colored illustrations in expensive books, watercolors here were quickly brushed on the pages, with little attention to lines and borders. Like the primers used by schoolchildren, chapbooks were printed in thousands of copies, but are now quite rare. Most were literally read to death, as the condition of this copy of The History of Tom Thumb illustrates.