I love one-night reads and so love pamphlets and their cousins, chapbooks.
Poets seem to have taken over chapbooks — Poets House in New York has a collection of 11,000 — but that wasn’t always the case.
The small books were simply called small books or “merriments” or worse until the word chapbook came into use in 1798. A chapman was a peddler, selling things at reasonable prices — cheap, a word that came from chap.
Chapbooks were the kind of books that peddlers sold. They were cheap because they were little. A typical format was 5½ by 4¼, and 24 pages was a good size.
They were the books of the people who were not rich. Publishers often aimed at what they thought was a lower-class market.
Chapbooks might be about anything: legends, biblical tales, heroes, saints, ballads, notorious crimes, ghosts, fairy tales. There were serious poems — Coleridge liked the chapbook — and there were plays and almanacs. Some chapbooks contained news. The smallest books, which cost copper money, as opposed to silver or gold, might be 4 or 8 pages and contain something like an encyclopedia article.
Printing formats involve sociology. Today chapbooks, which once contained all kinds of things, belong to poets. Tracts, once as varied as chapbooks, now are associated with religious subjects, although politicians occasionally slip into the sanctuary. Articles printed in newspapers and magazines are vulgar, until they are reprinted as essays in books.
The question of whether you can prejudge a piece of writing by its printed format is fascinating. Some people have taken a perverse pleasure in taking a printing format that’s widely regarded as a sow’s ear and trying to make something of it.
Or, as an old editor once put it: Journalism could be a low-rent art form.
Incidentally, I was told a couple of years ago that all blogs are garbage and that the short age of the blog was already over.
• Sources: Roy Bearden-White, “A History of Guilty Pleasure: Chapbooks and the Lemoines”; The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 103(3), September 2009, pp. 284-318.
There are a lot of good introductions to the chapbook, but I sense a kindred spirit in Professor Bearden-White.
John Ashton, Chap-Books of the Eighteenth Century; London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1882. The Internet Archive has a version here:
https://archive.org/details/chapbooksofeight00asht/mode/2up
This book contains facsimiles and notes on the chapbook’s Golden Age.
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