Chapbooks and Literature
Chapbook is a nineteenth-century term derived from traveling peddlers known as chapmen who sold, among other items, booklets called chapbooks, many of which plagiarized summaries of published novels and stories.[ 4] Chapbooks no longer contain plagiarized text and are found almost entirely in the literary world. Many contemporary chapbooks are books of poetry, often publishing the work of emerging poets. Poets who have achieved success with larger publishers sometimes continue to publish in the chapbook form because they appreciate chapbooks as well as chapbook publishers, who epitomize independent, small presses. In higher education, creative writing faculty and students have long collected and read chapbooks.
- History of the Chapbookfrom Poets House in NYC
Digitized or Online Chapbooks
- University of York Chapbooks Collectionlog in to JSTOR with your Pace credentials.The Borthwick and Special Collections at the University of York has a collection of historic chapbooks from the 1700s-1800s
- Chapbooks of the Mimeo Revolutionthis small digitized collection "celebrates a period extending from the early 1960s through the mid-1980s, when small presses proliferated and chapbooks contained some of the most innovative poetry of the time." at Poets House
Selected Chapbooks from the Pace Faculty Center Collection UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Articles and Book Chapters about Chapbooks
- A Look Back: 9 Queer & Trans BIPOC Chaps from 2021by Muriel Leung, April 6, 2022, on the Lambda Literary website
- Word for Word: Chapbooks – small and covetableChonchúir, Nuala Ní. “Word for Word: Chapbooks – Small and Covetable.” The Irish Tiimes, 9 Nov. 2013, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/word-for-word-chapbooks-small-and-covetable-1.1585990. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021.
- A History of Guilty Pleasures: Chapbooks and the LemoinesBearden-White, Roy. “A History of Guilty Pleasure: Chapbooks and the Lemoines.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 103, no. 3, [The University of Chicago Press, Bibliographical Society of America], 2009, pp. 284–318, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24293816.
- Chapbooks (book chapter)BISHOP, WENDY, and DAVID STARKEY. “Chapbooks.” Keywords in Creative Writing, University Press of Colorado, 2006, pp. 25–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt4cgr61.10.
Poetry Broadsides
Poetry broadsides are part of the world of activist, small press poetry. They tend to be larger in format, like art posters in many cases. Read a short blog post about broadsides from the Library of Congress.
The Mortola Pace Library in Pleasantville owns a book about the poetry broadside tradition, focusing on the 1960s. It can be requested through InterLibrary Loan (ILL) if you are at Pace NYC.
Sullivan, James D. On the Walls and in the Streets : American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s. University of Illinois Press, 1997.