"No Tinker, Peddler, or petit Chapman shall wander about from the Towne..."
— an English ordinance from 1553, as cited by the Oxford English Dictionary

We are sheer enthusiasts of the chapbook form.

Whether you're talking lytle books or booklets, 'zines or pamphlets, luboks or folkboks, we want to read them and keep them, and in turn, to publish more of them for others to read and covet and keep.

Please visit our catalogue to see a listing of our previous chapbook projects. In most cases, you'll find purchasing links on the page for individual titles, allowing you to order single or multiple copies in quantity. If you have trouble finding a title you believe is in our catalogue, or would like to inquire about a custom order, feel free to email us directly.

Pen & Anvil publishes chapbook as one-off projects or as titles in series. Some are commissioned, but many proposals come in over the transom. To submit chapbook proposals or to ask questions about our chapbook activities, please email our chapbooks editors.

See the Ampersand blog for a listing of all our past and current calls for chapbook submissions.

We especially welcome submissions from authors who are not members of demographic groups already over-represented in literary publishing. Given the structural inequality baked into systems of education, communication, and discovery, we are not surprised that our submissions and proposals represent a narrower ranger of the lived experiences of gender, culture, and class than we intend for our publishing catalog to reflect. Are you an author from an underrepresented demographic? Would you like to suggest an author from an underrepresented class? We want to hear from you.

We're often asked for guidelines. Fiction? Sure! Poetry? Sure! There's a broad range of material we're going to want to work with. Generally, we are interested in quotable prose; art; translation; fragments; jokes, snacks; and experimental and open-minded writing. Be good. Be gucci, even. Above all, be not boring.

We soberly believe that all God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. It's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show! Of each of our contributors, we wish fervently to say with conviction: She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.

For chapbooks not published directly under the Pen & Anvil imprint, we maintain several lines of chapbook-format series.

• Komma Series titles are published in 5 x 5 paper format. "These bite-sized booklets are a mouthful of literature each, intended to be read in a single sitting." Authors who publish in Komma Series will receive 24 free copies, as well as the option to purchase as many more as they like at cost. Komma Series chapbooks remain continuously available in PDF format on the Press website. Several Komma Series titles have been distributed as tuck-ins with issues of The Charles River Journal.
• The Pusteblume Books imprint includes works in translation published in chapbook or pamphlet format. For more information about our translation projects, email the editors of Pusteblume journal.
• Torch Series titles are expressions of and incitements to resistance against fascism, authoritarianism, and other forms of oppression. Previous titles have included reprints of social media content protesting Maduro's crackdown on Venezuelan youth activists; limericks lampooning Donald Trump; a guide to safe direct action; and essays on the relations between organized religion and political organizing. This series is edited by the staff of Secular Age. To request a list of all Torch Series titles, or to propose a chapbook or broadside, please contact them directly.
• The Hawk & Whippoorwill imprint is for books and chapbooks printed in partnership with our journal of nature poetry by the same name. Titles in this imprint relate directly to the relationship between humanity and nature. For more information, contact the Hawk & Whippoorwill editors directly.
• Unfamiliar Forces and Spacepub Mag are sibling 'zines, focusing on speculative/fantasy writing and sci-fi writing, respectively. Both 'zines are affiliated with the Boston-based Sci-Fi Study Hall, and each publishes new issues in chapbook format in numbered sequence. Both are edited by Cassandra Jones, who can answer your questions about submissions or placing orders.
• Finally, Paper Tooth is our series title for chapbooks in unconventional formats.

A special word about our commitment to unconventional formats in the Paper Tooth imprint...

• We've written out poems in longhand on hand-made paper, and burned them to ashes, and published the text as ashes in sealed glass bottles.
• We've published a short story as a set of coasters in a commemorative metal tin.
• We've published texts as a handful of telegrams; as words and images printed directly into an exam blue book; as transparency overlays in a bound notebook; as individual memory cards bound with ribbon; as items on a cardstock breakfast menu; as boxes of brown paper origami flowers; as sixteen-foot scrolls; as captions in an autumnal herbarium; and in various other forms.

For Paper Tooth, we are attracted to projects with a sculptural or handmade aspect, and especially attracted to projects which make use of materials or formats not typically associated with creative writing: calendars, recipe cards, clothing, cereal boxes, transit maps, household bills, beach towels, nests, roofing tiles, pages of slate, pages of pearl.

If you'd like to propose a chapbook for publication under the Paper Tooth imprint, contact us to start a conversation.

For Pen & Anvil purposes, our chapbooks differ from books in making use of formats other than shelf-standard trim size and page count. These are not perfect-bound volumes intended for bookstore distribution. Rather, our chapbooks are ephemeral, personalized artifacts that circulate in more vernacular ways. Since our chapbooks don't require the capital investment of a standard print run, they are generally much cheaper than book printing. Consider the advantage to an author at a reading event. You might lug a tub of your sales copies to the venue with you, in hopes of selling a handful for $10 or more. Not every reader is ready to make a purchase at that price point. A chapbook, however, can be sold for a dollar or two, or in some cases, can be given away. More readers go home with some of your work in their hands, which means more people are going to be sharing and talking about your work after the reading. And your bio and social media are on that chapbook, so you're driving audience growth with a minimal investment. Use chapbooks to sign up followers, increase your mailing list size, and improve your marketing reach as an author building your audience. There's also the audience engagement opportunity that the chapbook format provides. While you might go a year or more between book-length collections, it takes little time to bring a set of texts together and get a new chapbook title ready for distribution. This means you have news and content to share, keeping your readers invested in your ongoing career.

Suffice to say that as editors, designers, and advisors to authors, we believe chapbooks provide great opportunities for business and for art.

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