When printed Hebrew and Yiddish books became affordable for a wide reading audience in the early Modern period, the earliest and most common sellers of these books were travelling vendors. In Eastern Europe these peddlers were known as pakn tregers (sing. pakn treger; Yidd.; “parcel carriers”). They performed an important function in the dissemination of normative writings, but they also helped spread the concepts of the Enlightenment as well as new religious ideas.