Putting It Together: DIY Chapbooks

 

About once a year, I try to make my own chapbook. I have a halfway decent printer, although I still mourn my old HP, which served me well for ten years. The new HP requires an internet account with HP, and like all so-called updates, has added unnecessary steps to accomplish what should be simple tasks. I don’t buy that “improvements behind the scenes” crap either. Built-in obsolescence at its finest. But I’ve figured it out pretty much, and as soon as that color ink cartridge arrives (cheapest at Amazon, though I’ve minimized my purchases there) I’ll be ready to go.

There are programs out there to make my life easier when it comes to doing layouts, but I fumble through it pretty much manually. Last of the great eye ballers, I should write down more of my method while I’m doing it, but no. That would be no challenge! The layout is horizontal, and I create two columns. I fool with the margins and gutter, whatever that is, and print up a lot of test pages before going into full production. Hence, my press runs are quite small. I just don’t have the patience to create 500 copies of a 20-page chapbook. And actually, thank goodness it is a chapbook, because I still haven’t figured out how to number the pages. With a work this brief, it’s unnecessary, truly.

I do have fun with the cover, and that’s one of the big attractions for me to do it myself. The illusion of total control. I’ve been dabbling in collage and other visual expressions, but they’re really not clicking for me. With this chapbook, I’ve defaulted to a simple design that has served me for several volumes: white cover, black title and author lines in various fonts, and a photo added from my phone or elsewhere. I feel like I cheated a little with this one, since although the poems are from a monthly series I did in 2015, the photo dates from a year or two later. It’s cropped from a larger image, and was taken in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. It seems to suit the mood, and grab the eye.

I’ll have the place to myself this weekend, so we’ll see where all the daily chores of living a decent human life fall on the list. I may just focus on this, and give myself something new to offer on April 30^th, when I take part in a Poetry Month marathon at the Woodstock Library. In person. Real people. I can hardly wrap my head around it.