Creating a Fiction Chapbook « Flash Fiction Chronicles

Creating a Fiction Chapbook « Flash Fiction Chronicles

Marko Fong This is Part 3 of an intermittent FFC series on Chapbooks and Part 1 of “Electronic Chapbooks” by Marko Fong. His Part 2 will appear tomorrow, October 19. Part 1 of the Chapbooks series was written by Bonnie ZoBell. ”Creating a Fiction Chapbook“ appeared at FFC on September 10.
by Marko Fong
Electronic publishing has one clear disadvantage when compared to paper– once you’re done reading, you can’t use it as toilet paper. Apparently during the 16th century, personal hygiene was one of many secondary uses for early chapbooks. Until recently, I’d never thought a lot about chapbooks much less their secondary uses. They were just something that poets printed up so they’d have something to sell at readings. In case you’re wondering, my answer is “No, I’ve never done that to someone else’s chapbook.” I’ll swear it on my copies of Fifty Shades of Grey and Paul Ryan’s budget plan.
Fifteen months ago, Jo-Anne Rosen, asked me to help her with e-Chapbook.com (the “e” is for “electronic”). I became fiction editor which basically means that Jo-Anne does all the work and I do the fun stuff. Before we published electronic ones, I had to learn more about traditional chapbooks.
The English-language chapbook was the product of three historical developments, the paper mill (paper got much cheaper), printing, and the rise of literacy among the poor. The difference between inexpensive paper and quality paper today is much less extreme than it was then. We now assume that paper will be high contrast, take and hold inks readily, resist tearing, and maintain uniform size and thickness. Even as recently as the sixties, some paperbacks were printed on paper that failed to meet all those standards. If an ordinary person in the 16th century, wanted to share a broadside, a ballad, poems, nursery rhymes, or stories, the options were limited. Alongside the printers who produced those King James Bibles with the gold-leaf edging, leather covers, hand-stitched bindings, and smear-free ink, a “people’s” medium for publication emerged that,
Didn’t have a binding or hard cover Was made by folding sheets of low-quality paper multiple times (32 pages or 5 folds came from this tradition) and was physically smaller than a printed book. Used quick-inexpensive production and printing techniques (illustration was limited to simple woodcuts) with low quality ink on cheap paper. The product was meant to last about as long as Rock of Ages stayed in movie theaters.
These were “chapbooks.” The middle English word for “cheap” was “ceap.” They sold for anywhere from two to twelve pence a copy and instead of being sold through booksellers were distributed in pubs, on street corners, at markets, and other public gatherings by a new sort of peddler called a “chapman”(not to be confused with the guy who killed John Lennon). The form became phenomenally successful. Because few examples of early chapbooks survive, we forget how much more prolific the chapbook publishing industry was than its bound-book brother.
If you had a pub song, a political complaint, a poem, or a story, the chapbook was the most efficient way to “get the word” out before daily newspaper, radio, television, or Facebook. The chapbook became the information medium for “ordinary” people. As the British economy shifted to manufacturing, the literacy rate rose dramatically. An estimated 60% of adult males in England were literate by the mid-1700’s, a figure considerably higher than the rate for Fox News viewers (fwiw I wish Fox had a paper publication). Most of those who could read lacked the income necessary to buy bound books.
Perhaps the most famous chapbook ever, though it’s usually called a pamphlet, was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a publication that made the case for American independence from England. In the years 1775-1776, an estimated 500,000 copies of Paine’s Common Sense were printed and distributed when the total population of the colonies was 2.5 million. Chapbooks weren’t intended to be physically permanent, but some definitely aren’t forgotten.
The chapbook form faded after the emergence of the cheap daily newspaper, a new kind of disposable print that spawned a writer named, Charles Dickens. The tradition, however, has continued in poetry and for fiction writers. Notably, Lawrence Ferlinghetti helped to revive the form in the fifties by publishing the Beats through City Lights’ Pocket Poet series, an homage to the traditional chapbook’s smaller physical size. It’s still common for writers to put together up to sixty pages and distribute it as a “chapbook”, but modern chapbooks frequently aren’t intended for ordinary readers, aren’t meant to be disposable, nor are they currently the cheapest way to distribute writing. The modern paper chapbook has become a niche medium often intended for a highly-sophisticated audience. _______________________