A chapbook is a small printed book — more a thin pamphlet than a fat hardback. Hundreds of years ago in Britain, travelling sellers called chapmen carried them in a pack and sold them in streets and villages: songs, jokes, saints’ lives, shocking stories. They were reading matter for people who did not own a library. Today poets and small presses still call a slim stapled collection a chapbook, so the word lives in two times at once: the old pedlar’s booklet, and the modern poetry pamphlet. The sense you are given — writings about literature, poetry, or religion — fits both, though the old ones were often rougher and more mixed than that tidy list. It is not a “chapter book.” Those are children’s novels cut into chapters. The chap- bit is from the seller, not from chapter.