The Birth of a Chapbook

A few substacks ago, I wrote about the history of chapbooks and a simple way of making them. I’m pleased to report that Heart-Threads: Bonds that Bind had a successful birth in time for my writing group’s National Poetry Month reading on April 30. Here’s the cover:

You can see that this slim volume has all of eight poets, each of them getting four pages each. Generally, reactions have been very positive; people comment on the quality of not only the poetry, but also the production, and the cover — the illustration is a painting of a park in Prague by the late Barbara Feith, one of a group of studio artists at the Women’s Art Association of Canada. My writing group collaborated for a decade with Barbara and her colleagues, each year putting together an exhibition of artwork with our ekphrastic poems beside the visual creations. In honour of the four mothers in my poetry group, and the artists we worked with on what is probably the world’s largest, and longest-running ekphrastic collaboration, Happy Mother’s Day!

So, what did I learn from putting my theories of chapbook design into an actual book. First: don’t use Word/Office 365 or a similar general word processing program for this purpose. It can be done — as I proved — but it’s a pain in the butttinsky, because the software treats the pages as a continuous file rather than a set of discrete pages, meaning each time you add or cut something, other elements move around. One recurring problem was keeping the page numbers in place, because I had put them at the bottom of the printable area for each page, so every time a line got cut or added elsewhere, they’d move somewhere unfortunate. I should have learned (or paid an expert to use) a program like Publisher or InDesign that anchors elements such as titles, page numbers, etc.

Illustration courtesy of Freepic.com

The second major learning point was that I didn’t have to figure out the whole which-page-goes-where order in the layout so that when printed on both sides and bound, they would read correctly. I was used to doing that myself, because the first chapbooks I produced were simply copied double-sided from the masters, assembled and stapled. The printer I used has software that takes care of that “in about a minute,” I was told. I just had to supply a file in normal order.

Something I already knew was to be careful in choosing the printing company. You need someone who has not only mastered their craft, but remains patient with fiddly little jobs that don’t earn huge payments. I went to the Anderson Press on Queen St. East near Coxwell in Toronto. The husband-and-wife team who run it not only gave me a fair quote and a beautiful product, but made a proof copy several times, as necessary changes were made to the master file… and they gave me ten more copies than were contracted for! I can’t praise them highly enough.

So, overall, despite frustrations brought on by some of my own choices, I’m glad to have put this publication together on what is approximately the 25th anniversary of the Long Dash group. If you want a copy yourself, they’re ONLY $10 CAN, plus the mailing cost (usually about $4). Just contact me and I’ll send one to you.

Like what you’re reading? You can encourage my creative process by buying me a coffee.