Chapbooks, Anyone?
I was talking to a friend recently about a poet’s collection that I’d like to see put into a chapbook, when my friend said, “what’s that?” And while I’ve used the word here, there, and a little of everywhere, I had to admit that I … didn’t actually know.
So for those of you who, like me, tend to sometimes use words without knowing mch about their origins, here’s a little history lesson. Chapbooks originated in the Renaissance. Paper was fairly scarce, but a growing number of people in Europe were learning to read. Chapbooks were small printed books containing stories, poetry, songs, even sermons or essays, and were sold fairly cheaply. The men who bought them from the printers and then turned around and sold them on the street (the precursors, perhaps, of modern newsstands), were called chapmen … and the books, chapbooks.
These days, chapbooks are often used for poetry collections or essay collections, and are often given as well as being sold. They are also used by some publishers as a “teaser” of sorts for an author’s forthcoming book, a promotional/marketing tool to entice readers to purchase the book itself.
As Wikipedia would have it,
No exact definition can be applied. Chapbook can mean anything that would have formed part of the stock of chapmen, a variety of pedlar. The word chapman probably comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for barter, buy and sell. The term chapbook was formalised by bibliophiles of the nineteenth century, as a variety of ephemera (disposable printed material.) It includes many kinds of printed material, such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales, children’s literature and almanacs. Where there were illustrations, they would be popular prints.
Want to read more? Someone at MIT did some work on chapbooks that can be found here.
And this just in: According to reader and book producer extraordinaire Dick Margulis, “Aldus Manutius commissioned the first italic types specifically to cram more words onto the pages of chapbooks, for a competitive cost advantage.”
So next time you want to mention collecting a friend’s poems into a chapbook, you’ll know whereof you speak (as will I!). And then, like me, you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Books, About Writing, Words on July 17th, 2008