This week I made a shocking discovery, and I’m so embarrassed by my ignorance! Many of my zines—those little pamphlets I’ve lovingly folded, stapled, and fussed over—aren’t actually zines at all.
I can’t remember where I first came across this particular nugget of humbling information, maybe while reading about the history of zines, but the realization hit hard. To be fair, the first ten or so were true zines. But when I published The Shopping List—officially “Zine 11,” a condensed version of a short story I turned into a zine because I’d run out of new ideas that week—it should have been called a chapbook.
Apparently, my desperate week of no ideas accidentally promoted me to publisher.
Physically, the two are nearly indistinguishable, which is probably how I fooled myself for so long. Both are small-press or handmade, smaller than a typical half-sheet of paper, often fewer than twenty pages, and filled with text and illustration. But the difference lies in their DNA. Zine is short for magazine—born in the art and music scenes where creators wanted to share their work without waiting for permission. Chapbook, on the other hand, comes from the peddlars (chapmen) who sold inexpensive printed stories centuries ago. (“Chap” traces back to the Old English cēap, meaning barter, the same root as cheap—which makes me feel better about my budget paper choices.)
Chapbooks have always been little carriers of imagination. Long before public libraries or mass publishing, they were how stories, songs, and ideas reached ordinary people. Their history stretches back to the 1500s, though the English term chapbook wasn’t coined until the early 1800s. Before then, the French sold bibliothèque bleue with their signature blue covers; in Portugal they hung literatura de cordel from strings for display; and in Germany readers enjoyed volksbuch. In England, they were usually called pamphlets.
A chapbook might hold a ballad, a fable, a sermon, or a bit of political mischief (yes, The Rights of Man counts, and so do penny dreadfuls). They were democratic in the truest sense—portable stories meant to travel farther than their authors ever could, and vital to the spread of literacy.
Zines came along in the early 1900s with that same restless independence but a different purpose. Where chapbooks shared literature, zines shared voice—personal opinions, art, activism, or community culture. Chapbooks ask to be read like stories; zines invite conversation, response, and trade. One leans toward literary craft, the other toward social connection. Zines have a rebellious streak too—they were the soapboxes and bullhorns of the twentieth century.
And yet, the two often meet in the middle. A zine that tells a personal story with narrative intent becomes a kind of chapbook; a chapbook filled with collage or reflection drifts toward zine territory. The difference isn’t a rulebook—it’s intent. It’s how the creator hopes the work will live in someone else’s hands.
That overlap is what I love. Today’s small presses and indie makers—whether printing poems, stories, or illustrated tales—are still carrying the same creative torch. We’re making literature personal again, meant to be held, gifted, and kept.
So, I’m officially designating Realmscapes as the small-press imprint for my zines and chapbooks. To keep things clear, I’ll label each by intent: the art-oriented, personal, or traded works will stay “zines,” while the story-driven, literary pieces will be “chapbooks.”
Discovering that my “zines” are actually chapbooks isn’t a failure. It’s more like realizing your family heirloom isn’t just decorative—it’s part of a centuries-old tradition. And honestly, I’m a little thrilled. It turns out I’ve been running a small press all along.
