How to Prepare a Chapbook

8/3/2019 How to Prepare a Chapbook

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HOW TO PREPARE A CHAPBOOK

Preparation of the poems, ordering etc.

Group your poems by theme/location/speaker etc,much as one would see a display of paintings on

the wall of a gallery. They should be arranged soas to lend an additional sense to or synergise eachother. A mathematical simplification for thisprocess could be rendered in this example of form:(a + b + c leads to d). A story or narrative isformed by the careful arrangement of the poemsin relation to each other. When we look at thepossibilities a chapbook affords we see that we canarrange groups of poems like this {(a + b + cleads to d) + (e + f + g + h + i leads to j) + (k + l

+ m + n leads to o)} and so on; building on thesmaller stories in this manner leads to ametanarrative within the chapbook.

Document preparation.

1) Type (or cut/copy and paste) all yourpoems onto a new MS Word document.

2) Click on File and scroll down to PageSetup. Click.

3) Choose the Landscape orientation.4) Set your margins to 1.5 cm top, bottom,

left and right. Click on OK.5) Click on Format and scroll down to

Columns. Click.6) Select two columns and set your spacing

to 3 cm. Click on OK.

7) Choose one font that you are going towork in. Multiple fonts on one page lookmessy and amateurish when used byanyone but a very good graphic designer.Avoid anything that is not clearly legiblewhen held at arms length. Choose a serif

typeface as serifs (the pointy bits onlettering) facilitate the reading of largebodies of text. A poem may not seem likea lot of text but a book of poetry is. Sansserif fonts are best used as chapterheadings or titles in books or in areas suchas graphic design and advertising wherethe viewer is required to focus on only afew words at a time.

8) Click on Edit and scroll down to Select

all. Click.9) Click on the pull-down arrow beside thefont name and select your chosen text.Click.

10) Save your work under an instantlyrecognisable filename. There are toomany doc.1s in this world.

11) Choose a size for your text. Depending onthe font this may be between 12 and 14pt. Anything smaller is illegible except to

eagle-eyes, anything larger looks childishexcept on a smaller page or withaccompanying illustrations. There areexceptions to every rule.

12) Titles should be set in a larger pt than themain body of text in order that they maybe distinguished. It is a matter of taste


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whether you capitalise or italicise yourtitles but you must be consistent.

13) Avoid the use of the bold or underlinebuttons unless you have a very specificreason for each use. Otherwise, it willprobably seem to a reader that the person

who designed this book regards thebuttons as amazing novelties, the samegoes for centring poems they look likefish on the page most of the time.

14) Resetting your line spacing to line and ahalf or double spacing should be verycarefully considered before attempted. The reason for this being that oncestarted, one cannot stop until the wholebook has been spaced in the one manner.


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Printing instructions (for a forty page chapbook).

To print the chapbook click on the File drop-downmenu and select Print.

Print sheets 1 10 (were going to call the pages of

MS Word sheets so as not to get confusedbetween the pages of the document and pages ofthe chapbook).

Take note of how the paper comes out of theprinter: whether the TITLES emerge on the left orright of you as you face the printer head on; whichsheet in the print run is printed first the first orlast?; also, whether the paper goes upwards andaround the roller or feeds straight down (i.e. the

printer prints on the reverse side of the paperfacing up as you feed it into the tray or the printerdoes its job on the upwards face of the paper asyou load it? Its the difference between bottom-feed printers with drawers and top-feed printers,thats all really.)

Taking all that into account, were now going toprint sheets 11-20.

Arrange the sheets so that sheet 11 will be printedon the reverse of sheet 10, sheet 12 printed on thereverse of sheet 9, sheet 13 on the reverse ofsheet 8, etc, etc.

Feed the sheets into the printer and print eachsheet one at a time, just to make sure the printer

doesnt whip up two sheets at once which wouldskew everything and require a reprint from thestart.

Examine each sheet as it comes out of the printerjust to make sure that you havent printed part of

the chapbook upside-down.

Print sheet 21 on its own this is the cover andhas nothing on its reverse.

When all the sheets are printed arrange them intothe order of the chapbook and fold down themiddle, et voil! you now have a rough copy ofhow the chapbook will look. This process soundsintensive but will not be repeated for the full print

run, you just feed the master copy into aphotocopier, and press double-sided and collate.

GENERAL TIPS

Buy good quality materials for your chapbooks, asthere are too many cheap and nasty-lookingpublications in existence. If youre to get back thecost of your labour you have to have an attractivepresentation for your work.

Keep your workspace spotless one sticky coffeestain may destroy a number of books. Remember,you can only sell copies of your book that are inperfect condition.


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Allow for ten per cent spoilage in your productionestimates. It would surprise you how easy it is tofluff a guillotine cut or stapling job. And there area lot of cuts and staples involved

Avoid hand-stitching until youre familiar with the

printing process, not until youve published at leastone chapbook should you consider hand-stitchingas it is so labour-intensive.

Avoid table-top photocopiers as they will donothing but warp your paper through excessiveheat. The ideal photocopier for a print-run is asbig as a small car (think of 1 000 double-sided andcollated sheets being run off in the one job). Cleanthe screen before you start.


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Self-publishing a chapbook why do it?

To paraphrase Michael Hartnett, the act of self-publishing is a rebel act. Self-publishing achapbook allows a writer to open up his or her ownalternative space, as Anne Moeglin-Delcroix writesin her essay Little Books and Other LittlePublications, a sort of slip-road beside the mainthoroughfare. Very often the decision to publish achapbook is born of frustration and the inability toget ones work accepted by an establishedpublisher. This does not mean that a writers workis substandard when self-published, nor does itmean that every self-published book is a vanitypublication. When one looks at the Irish poetryscene, each and every book of poetry published

with a full-colour cover is a vanity publication forthere is no way any one of the Irish poetry pressescould utilise such expensive printing techniqueswithout serious Arts Council funding as a prop to afinancial exercise with no viability.

A rose is a rose

Chapbook (from the Old English ceap, meaning tobarter), pamphlet, opuscule, little book or

publication are all terms one hears bandied aroundsuch a little sliver of print. And contentious too,when we consider the use of pamphlet with itsconnotations of pamphleteers and pamphleteering,the practice of ruthless and talentless self-promotion. Question 1 name one writer whodoes not engage in self-promotion. Answer none.

Question 2 who is most likely to use such a term?Answer the establishment. And by the use of thisterm I am going to go back in time to whenpamphlets originated, to the period of Georgiancoffee-houses, Swift and Pope and their satiricalswipes at personages and practices of the day.Lets go forward a little to another period wherelittle books flourished, the collapse of the AncienRegime in France, where hawkers sold swingeingattacks upon a vainglorious and callous queen(Marie Antoinette) and her impotent King, LouisXVI, the infamous Sun King (it, at least, was able torise, and poor Louis couldnt when he tried). Fastforward again to the Second World War and itsausterities, the Parisian riots of 1968. The littlebook was there at them all, and in the middle of it.


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PAGINATION

1. Take an A4 sheet and place it into thelandscape position (longest side horizontal).

2. Now fold it in half from left to right. You nowhave four A5 pages.

3. Mark the front page with a no. 1, turn thepage and mark 2 on the inside left, 3 on theinside right and 4 on the reverse.

4. This is pagination at its most basic. You havea four-page booklet.

5. Now take two A4 sheets (one on top of the

other) and repeat instructions nos. 1 & 2.You now have an eight-page booklet.

6. Follow instruction no. 3 until you havemarked every page with its correspondingno., from 1 8.

7. Open both sheets and look at the pagenumbering. You will see (if this is donecorrectly its your first check that the

pagination is right) that when you add thetwo nos. they will total the number of pagesin your booklet plus one, e.g. in the eightpage booklet nos. 8 & 1 should be on thesame side of the A4 sheet (8+1=9). Turn thesheet around and you will see nos. 7 & 2 onthe same side (7+2=9). Youll see nos. 4 & 5

on the same side (4+5=9) and 3 & 6 on thesame side as each other (3+6=9).

8. For the pagination of a largerbooklet/chapbook you will need to work outyour pagination on a rough piece of paperbefore you go about the layout. I use an A4sheet and draw a rectangle for each pair ofpages and work out my sequence from there,e.g. for a forty-page chapbook I draw twentylandscape rectangles and bisect each onefrom top to bottom. I now have arepresentation of the forty pages and I writein the page nos. with the correspondingpoems.

9. To be honest, I find this a difficult concept toexplain using text only. I normally usediagrams on a face-to-face basis and willhave to work out a means of illustrating thisin a Word document. I was shown thismethod face-to-face and need to think abouthow to explain it in another way.

How to Prepare a Chapbook

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