cheap print
Low-cost art copy
Cheap print refers to inexpensive printed materials produced for mass consumption—pamphlets, broadsides, chapbooks, penny dreadfuls, and popular illustrations sold to ordinary people rather than collectors or scholars.
The term appears mostly in historical and academic contexts discussing early modern publishing: Cheap print spread news and ballads to the barely literate.
It captures a category defined by affordability and accessibility rather than literary merit or production quality.
- chapbooksShort literary pamphlets
- penny dreadfulsCheap Victorian horror serials
- dime novelsCheap sensational 19th-century fiction
- pulp fictionSensational cheap literature
- broadsidesSimultaneous discharge of guns
pulp · zines · press · lithography · flyers · mass market paperbacks · woodblock printing · newsprint · pamphlets · tabloid · comic books · samizdat · catchpenny · movable type · mass production · serialized fiction · gutter press · posters
- chapbookschapbooks, booklet, booklets, blue books, broadsides
- serial novelscliffhanger, installment, chapter, episode, serialization
cheap printlimited edition
Small intentional production run
signed print · artist's proof · numbered edition · fine art print · lithograph