Chapbook, containing four books bound together in a brown paper cover: Jack the Giant Killer, History of Bluebeard. The Guess Book, and The Book of Wild Beasts. It has monochrome illustrations from engravings. It has been covered, and possibly bound, at a later date with brown paper, with an inscription on the front written in pencil: '4 books containing 47 woodcuts. 1/6'. Published by W. Davison, Alnwick.
When infant schools became established in England in the 1830s, William Davison was a major supplier nationally of educational “chap� books; primers for new readers or illustrated short stories designed to stimulate young minds. On a sheet of foolscap paper eight panels of vignettes and text would be printed, then another eight on the reverse. Cut and folded they produced a child-size 16 page book which was cheap to produce and hence accessible to the masses.
