Library chapbooks are ‘hot type’

Excerpt: The Perfect Day All my fears have surrendered for now. There’s a pond of smooth water outside my window; clouds parade across its surface like happy animals. The ground is nearly ready to spill its green. Rain has scrubbed and rinsed the air of its soot; I can see my child coming home from miles down the road, just in time for the bread emerging from my oven – arcs of amber, mounds where the spirits live. Andrea Potos

The chapbook – mother of today’s paperbacks and a major source of Benjamin Franklin’s fortune – has risen, phoenixlike, at the university.

Except this phoenix, unlike the one that hung out in the Egyptian desert, has had a lot of help in regenerating itself. It came from the mile-a-minute mind of Ken Frazier, General Library System director, who suggested resurrecting the chapbook as an imprint of the library system’s new Parallel Press.

The chapbook was one of the first forms of popular literature, sold by – you guessed it – chapmen. Soon after the invention of the printing press around 1450, these itinerant peddlers began selling softcover pamphlet-sized books out of the back of a wagon, each for a penny. They featured folk tales such as Robin Hood, witticisms, poems and even broadsides against lawyers.

The English diarist Samuel Pepys collected chapbooks because he recognized their importance in cultural history. In fact, he buried his collection in his backyard to protect it from the Great Fire of London in 1665.

“By the 20th century,” says Frazier, “the chapbook had become a medium for preserving the craft of letterpress printing, published primarily for collectors. But with the Parallel Press, we’re now using computer technology and offset printing to revive chapbooks as an affordable medium for publishing poetry.”

Parallel Press plans to publish six chapbooks of poetry a year. So far six have come out, featuring the work of Wisconsin-based poets.

The books are attractively designed and offset-printed on archival-quality paper. The production editor is Tracy Honn of the Silver Buckle Press, a letterpress operation of GLS, and the editorial coordinator is Andrea Potos. Each volume costs $10, with an annual six-book subscription at $50.

“We’re just trying to develop a simple, small-scale economic model for publishing poetry that will about break even,” says Frazier. “Our first two chapbooks sold out their 300-copy runs, and we’ve attracted wonderful manuscripts, enough that we’re already committed through summer 2001.”

Copies can be ordered by writing to Parallel Press, 236 Memorial Library, calling 262-2600, or visiting the Parallel Press Web site.

Frazier’s no poet himself, “but I want to play,” he says with a laugh. “And maybe the best way I can play is by being a poetry impresario.”