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 so as to lend an additional sense to or synergise each other. A mathematical simplification for this process could be rendered in this example of form: (a + b + c leads to d). A story or narrative is formed by the careful arrangement of the poems in relation to each other. When we look at the possibilities a chapbook affords we see that we can arrange groups of poems like this {(a + b + c leads to d) + (e + f + g + h + i leads to j) + (k + l + m + n leads to o)} and so on; building on the smaller stories in this manner leads to a metanarrative within the chapbook. Document preparation.
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Type (or cut/copy and paste) all your poems onto a new MS Word document. Click on File and scroll down to Page Setup. Click. Choose the Landscape orientation. Set your margins to 1.5 cm top, bottom, left and right. Click on OK. Click on Format and scroll down to Columns. Click. Select two columns and set your spacing to 3 cm. Click on OK.

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Choose one font that you are going to work in. Multiple fonts on one page look messy and amateurish when used by anyone but a very good graphic designer. Avoid anything that is not clearly legible when held at arms length. Choose a serif typeface as serifs (the pointy bits on lettering) facilitate the reading of large bodies of text. A poem may not seem like a lot of text but a book of poetry is. Sans serif fonts are best used as chapter headings or titles in books or in areas such as graphic design and advertising where the viewer is required to focus on only a few words at a time. Click on Edit and scroll down to Select all. Click. Click on the pull-down arrow beside the font name and select your chosen text. Click. Save your work under an instantly recognisable filename. There are too many doc.1s in this world. Choose a size for your text. Depending on the font this may be between 12 and 14 pt. Anything smaller is illegible except to eagle-eyes, anything larger looks childish except on a smaller page or with accompanying illustrations. There are exceptions to every rule. Titles should be set in a larger pt than the main body of text in order that they may be distinguished. It is a matter of taste

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whether you capitalise or italicise your titles but you must be consistent. Avoid the use of the bold or underline buttons unless you have a very specific reason for each use. Otherwise, it will probably seem to a reader that the person who designed this book regards the buttons as amazing novelties, the same goes for centring poems they look like fish on the page most of the time. Resetting your line spacing to line and a half or double spacing should be very carefully considered before attempted. The reason for this being that once started, one cannot stop until the whole book has been spaced in the one manner.

Printing instructions (for a forty page chapbook). To print the chapbook click on the File drop-down menu and select Print. Print sheets 1 10 (were going to call the pages of MS Word sheets so as not to get confused between the pages of the document and pages of the chapbook). Take note of how the paper comes out of the printer: whether the TITLES emerge on the left or right of you as you face the printer head on; which sheet in the print run is printed first the first or last?; also, whether the paper goes upwards and around the roller or feeds straight down (i.e. the printer prints on the reverse side of the paper facing up as you feed it into the tray or the printer does its job on the upwards face of the paper as you load it? Its the difference between bottomfeed printers with drawers and top-feed printers, thats all really.) Taking all that into account, were now going to print sheets 11-20. Arrange the sheets so that sheet 11 will be printed on the reverse of sheet 10, sheet 12 printed on the reverse of sheet 9, sheet 13 on the reverse of sheet 8, etc, etc. Feed the sheets into the printer and print each sheet one at a time, just to make sure the printer

doesnt whip up two sheets at once which would skew everything and require a reprint from the start. Examine each sheet as it comes out of the printer just to make sure that you havent printed part of the chapbook upside-down. Print sheet 21 on its own this is the cover and has nothing on its reverse. When all the sheets are printed arrange them into the order of the chapbook and fold down the middle, et voil! you now have a rough copy of how the chapbook will look. This process sounds intensive but will not be repeated for the full print run, you just feed the master copy into a photocopier, and press double-sided and collate. GENERAL TIPS Buy good quality materials for your chapbooks, as there are too many cheap and nasty-looking publications in existence. If youre to get back the cost of your labour you have to have an attractive presentation for your work. Keep your workspace spotless one sticky coffee stain may destroy a number of books. Remember, you can only sell copies of your book that are in perfect condition.

Allow for ten per cent spoilage in your production estimates. It would surprise you how easy it is to fluff a guillotine cut or stapling job. And there are a lot of cuts and staples involved Avoid hand-stitching until youre familiar with the printing process, not until youve published at least one chapbook should you consider hand-stitching as it is so labour-intensive. Avoid table-top photocopiers as they will do nothing but warp your paper through excessive heat. The ideal photocopier for a print-run is as big as a small car (think of 1 000 double-sided and collated sheets being run off in the one job). Clean the screen before you start.

Self-publishing a chapbook why do it? To paraphrase Michael Hartnett, the act of selfpublishing is a rebel act. Self-publishing a chapbook allows a writer to open up his or her own alternative space, as Anne Moeglin-Delcroix writes in her essay Little Books and Other Little Publications, a sort of slip-road beside the main thoroughfare. Very often the decision to publish a chapbook is born of frustration and the inability to get ones work accepted by an established publisher. This does not mean that a writers work is substandard when self-published, nor does it mean that every self-published book is a vanity publication. When one looks at the Irish poetry scene, each and every book of poetry published with a full-colour cover is a vanity publication for there is no way any one of the Irish poetry presses could utilise such expensive printing techniques without serious Arts Council funding as a prop to a financial exercise with no viability. A rose is a rose Chapbook (from the Old English ceap, meaning to barter), pamphlet, opuscule, little book or publication are all terms one hears bandied around such a little sliver of print. And contentious too, when we consider the use of pamphlet with its connotations of pamphleteers and pamphleteering, the practice of ruthless and talentless selfpromotion. Question 1 name one writer who does 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 this term I am going to go back in time to when pamphlets originated, to the period of Georgian coffee-houses, Swift and Pope and their satirical swipes at personages and practices of the day. Lets go forward a little to another period where little books flourished, the collapse of the Ancien Regime in France, where hawkers sold swingeing attacks upon a vainglorious and callous queen (Marie Antoinette) and her impotent King, Louis XVI, the infamous Sun King (it, at least, was able to rise, and poor Louis couldnt when he tried). Fast forward again to the Second World War and its austerities, the Parisian riots of 1968. The little book was there at them all, and in the middle of it.

PAGINATION 1. Take an A4 sheet and place it into the landscape position (longest side horizontal). 2. Now fold it in half from left to right. You now have four A5 pages. 3. Mark the front page with a no. 1, turn the page and mark 2 on the inside left, 3 on the inside right and 4 on the reverse. 4. This is pagination at its most basic. You have a 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 have marked every page with its corresponding no., from 1 8.
7. Open both sheets and look at the page

on the same side (4+5=9) and 3 & 6 on the same side as each other (3+6=9). 8. For the pagination of a larger booklet/chapbook you will need to work out your pagination on a rough piece of paper before you go about the layout. I use an A4 sheet and draw a rectangle for each pair of pages and work out my sequence from there, e.g. for a forty-page chapbook I draw twenty landscape rectangles and bisect each one from top to bottom. I now have a representation of the forty pages and I write in the page nos. with the corresponding poems. 9. To be honest, I find this a difficult concept to explain using text only. I normally use diagrams on a face-to-face basis and will have to work out a means of illustrating this in a Word document. I was shown this method face-to-face and need to think about how to explain it in another way.

numbering. You will see (if this is done correctly its your first check that the pagination is right) that when you add the two nos. they will total the number of pages in your booklet plus one, e.g. in the eight page booklet nos. 8 & 1 should be on the same side of the A4 sheet (8+1=9). Turn the sheet around and you will see nos. 7 & 2 on the same side (7+2=9). Youll see nos. 4 & 5