The Spoons That Are My Ears!

The first time I heard the word 'chapbook' I assumed it was a book for chaps, in other words full of pictures of naked women. I soon learned it wasn't. I think the writer D.F. Lewis introduced me to the word: he was always bandying it about. The first time I heard the word 'bandy' I assumed it was a French alcoholic drink. No I didn't. Anyway, the apparent truth of the matter is that chapbooks were originally sold by chapmen and that's how they earned their name. Does that help? I know it doesn't really. A chapbook is a pamphlet containing poems, ballads, stories or religious tracts. Fast to produce, cheap to buy, easy to digest, they have been a mainstay of writers for hundreds of years. The great Thomas Nashe was almost exclusively a chapbook writer.

Until yesterday I had three chapbooks to my own credit, Romance with Capsicum (1995), In Praise of Ridicule (2003) and The Skeleton of Contention (2004). Now I have a fourth, Madonna Park. This new chapbook has a colour cover and comes courtesy of The Penny Dreadful Company and can be ordered here. The owner of the aforementioned company is the extremely hard working and approachable Neil Jackson. Thanks to his encouragement I have created two other chapbooks and I'm working on yet another. I will announce details of all these soon... Madonna Park contains six brief tales from various stages of my career. These stories are:

(1) Big Game (1990) -- one of my earliest surviving stories and one of my first published (in a small press magazine with the charming name Dementia 13). I wrote this so long ago I almost feel it comes from another world...
(2) Three Friends (1993) -- a ghost story, part of my Taller Stories sequence (and thus maybe a future part of my Tallest Stories epic) and also the only story of mine to be turned into a play in Finland...