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About
Handmade Books,
Good Times
At Tiny Cat Press, we celebrate the art of homemade and handmade chapbooks.
About the Staff
Ross White and two black cats make handmade chapbooks in his basement.
Established in 2025.
Submissions
Tiny Cat Press is not open to submissions. We seek out delightful authors and books and ask if we can make something for them. Something limited edition and lovely. If they say yes, we do a little dance. If they say no, at least we shot our shot.
What are chapbooks?
Chapbooks are small booklets, traditionally inexpensive and simply made, that contain poetry, short stories, essays, or other material. They have a long history: chapbooks first emerged in Europe, particularly in Britain, during the 16th and 17th centuries. They were sold by chapmen—traveling peddlers—and that’s where the name chapbook came from.
Early chapbooks were cheaply printed on coarse paper, often just a single folded sheet, making 8, 12, or 24 pages. They were affordable and they were democratizing—they helped spread popular stories, folk tales, ballads, almanacs, and religious material to the working classes. Nowadays, they’re democratizing in another way: they offer chances for emerging authors to publish their first collection or for authors to experiment with projects that might not be commercially viable otherwise.
How big is a chapbook? Well, sizes and shapes vary, but chaps are generally 15-36 pages for poetry, and maybe a little longer for prose.
