Lubok is a type of graphic art. The prints were inexpensive narrative pictures made for mass circulation. Lubok is marked by bold techniques, including the grotesque and the deliberate distortion of its subject. Originally the main genre of the lubok was purely religious. Only later did artists begin creating lubok images to illustrate Russian fairy tales, heroic verse, legends and songs. Many strands of modern mass culture descend from lubok engravings, which served - for ordinary townspeople and villagers - as newspaper, icon and book of letters.