What is a Chapbook?

A chapbook is an informal self-published book, useful for personal collections of stories, sometimes including poetry, lyrics, and art. "Chapbook" is also a term currently used to denote low-cost hard copy production, particularly of personal writing. The genre has been revitalized in the past 20 years by the widespread of low-cost copy centers and the cultural revolutions spurred by both zines and slam poetry, the latter generating hundreds upon hundreds of self-published chapbooks that are used to fund tours across the United States and, in fact, the world.

Growing out of an earlier tradition of inexpensive ballad literature, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chapbooks were small publications that contained songs, poems, political treatises, folk stories, religious tracts, and all manner of short texts.