Chapbooks are small, relatively brief collections of poetry or short fiction. They usually have between 24 and 48 pages. The MIT website explains their origins (as well as those of the current surname, Chapman): “Chapbooks were so called because they were sold by peddlers known as chapmen. Chap comes from the Old English for trade, so a chapman was literally a dealer who sold books. Chapmen would carry boxes containing the conveniently sized editions, either in town on street corners, or traveling through the countryside.”
For many literary authors, a chapbook is their first publication. They make nice smaller items for gifts, or to sell at literary readings and other events. Due to their limited size, they are inexpensive to produce, and relatively easy to put together yourself. I have made several, using a printing company to produce the final editions. However, if you have access to a good photocopier, you could save money by doing the copying yourself. Chapbooks don’t have to look cheap. Here’s the somewhat battered cover and inside cover of a lovely chapbook that Sharon Berg put together when she still ran Big Pond Rumours press.
My favourite title among the various chapbooks I’ve written is Rimbaud’s Twisted Balls. This was produced by Nicky Drombolis, who ran Letters bookshop in Toronto before moving his operation to Thunder Bay..
If you’re reading this Substack, odds are you write yourself. I’ll show you my process for making inexpensive chapbooks. I’ve just been putting together one for my poetry workshop members, that we can launch during National Poetry Month in April.
Take a standard 8.5” X 11” sheet of paper, and fold it once so that you now have four pages, each 8.5” tall and 5.5” wide. Repeat this process until you have the right number of pages to contain the material you want in your chapbook. For the one I’m currently creating, that’s 9 sheets (making 36 pages) for the contents, plus a tenth one for the front and back covers. Now staple your folded pages together along their spine. This will become your “dummy” – a rough but invaluable guide to where each page will be. Number your pages with a pencil.
Now here’s the complicated part: Because of the folding and double-sided printing, you have to figure out which pages will share the same sheet of paper once the final product is folded and stapled into books. I used Word (now Office 365) to produce the pages, although this may be easier if you have access to design software like Adobe InDesign. I don’t, so I went with Word.
I set the layout to landscape (horizontal orientation) and created two columns on each sheet. Once folded, these will become two pages of the final book. Page 1, normally the title page, is in the right-hand column. The last page (36 in my latest chapbook) is in the left-hand column. To avoid confusion, I’ll call the two-column landscape pages a “sheet”. Because the final pages will be printed on both sides of each sheet of paper, the earlier and later pages trade places left and right as you proceed to build the pages. This is hard to explain in words, so I’ve drawn you a rough illustration.
In designing a 36-page chapbook, only the middle two pages (18 and 19) will actually appear side-by-side on the same sheet. Believe me, this becomes easier to understand if you make a little dummy of your own as explained above. This helps you keep track of which page goes where on each sheet.
Now that you’ve got your dummy done, lay out each sheet. I suggest, once you’re done, print out, fold and assemble these. If your home printer doesn’t do double-sided copying, print out each sheet, fold and assemble them using staples and Scotch tape, to make sure that everything appears where it should, once the folding and assembling is done.
A couple of fine points, for when you actually try making your first chapbook.
1. With shorter chapbooks, this may not be much of an issue, but here’s one to watch out for in a longer chapbook. As you place several folded sheets into one collection, pages near the center of the book will protrude a little farther on the sides because of the thickness of the pages underneath them. This can be fixed when the final copies are trimmed along the edge, but the result may be that your contents close to the centre of the book appear to have smaller outside margins once they are trimmed. You can avert this by making the left and right margins a bit wider in the central pages (18 and 19, 17 and 20, etc. in a 36-p. chapbook).
2. Printing companies usually accept the files as .pdfs, as things can move around when different versions of Word open a .doc or .docx file. They like the cover to be in a separate file from the contents, as it will normally be printed on “cover stock”, a thicker, stiffer type of paper.
Now, go publish yourself. I double-dog dare you…
Like this Substack?
I loved Vertex/Vertigo!