Did you know we’re smack in the middle of Book Blogger’s Appreciation Week? Yuh-huh. So let me take this opportunity to appreciate a recent arrival on the scene that really fills a gap in the local blogosphere: Reading Local Seattle. Started by up this past July by local author Matt Briggs as a sibling of Reading Local Portland in what we hope will be the beginning of a more widespread movement of local literary sites, Reading Local Seattle (is it too early to call it RLS?) is a gathering place for information and opinion on “locally produced literature, zines, pamphlets, blogs, novels, chapbooks, poetry, performance and anything else concerned with the written or spoken 
word.” You can read more about the site’s Puget Sound-wide plans in their first post, and be sure and link up and subscribe to their feed while you’re there – this could be just the sort of hangout that our bookish city deserves. See you there.
Appreciating Book Bloggers
6 responses to “Appreciating Book Bloggers”
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Thanks David. Gabe Barber, who started Reading Local, and I are trying to think about how lit events and locally produced literature might be better covered. Currently, event aggregation seems to be a promising approach, but it is proving to be a lot of info to find and “normalize.” This seems to speak to the relative health of local lit: an embarrassment of riches. Book reviews, profiles, and interviews also seem to make sense. If anyone has thoughts about this or would like to contribute the occasional book book review, profile of “local lit,” please drop me a line at [mattbriggs(at)readinglocal(dot)com.] Thanks!
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Hey, David — Is a chapbook a chapter book?
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Hey, cool lingo learner! Chapbook is just (cool) literary lingo for basically a small paperback book or booklet sort of thing. Initially these were antecendents to the modern paperback book – the popular reading of their day – dating back to the 1500s – with ballads, true crime stories, tales, etc. These days it refers more to a small book – often privately published – of prose or poetry. Basically it is roughly simiar to ‘zine, but an older term.
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Woah! Thanks for the neat new word! I’d never heard that one before.
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Just to put in my 2 cents. A great way to make a chapbook (or zine, too) is take a single piece of paper and fold it once. A single sheet is usually 8 1/2 x 11 inches. If you fold it you get, 4 pages each one is 8/12 x 5.5 inches. You can use the outside 2 as the front/back cover, and the inside 2 pages for your “book.” To make your book longer, you can add additional sheets of paper. Another sheet, puts you at 4 + 4 (8 pages, or 6 inside pages and the front/back cover.), 3 sheets = 12 pages, 4 sheets = 14 pages, and so on.
To bind it you can use a stapler. A crude but effective way just to staple it with a normal stapler like you might have at school. Just staple it along the folded edge. Or you can find or invest in “a long arm stapler” and staple through the spine. (This is called a saddle stitch staple, I think.)
Kind of annoying guy, but its a moving picture:
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Matt has it right according to my recollection. Back when I was in the local poetry trenches that was how we made ours to sell at the local festivals and off BBSs. I was under the impression that ‘chapbook’ was more a perversion of the term ‘cheap book’ as our saddle-stapled products were rarely long enough to have real chapters. Cool to get some history on them. (thanks David!)
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