Free to download PDF version: Feeding Rats on B Street

Yes, I’m asking you to print & fold your own copy of this little book. It requires just one sheet of paper. Open the pdf and print at actual size. How to fold instructions are located here.

Since this is the first in a series of mini chapbooks featuring my bad poetry, I’ll share a little background.

We were playing with this idea in 2015, but got bogged down in alignment issues.  Half the text must be inverted, so I was printing one half, rotating the paper, and running it through the printer again. That’s where the alignment issues began. The feed on my cheap inkjet printer consistently sucks the paper in with little regard to the margins set by the word processor. It wants, and takes, more than a quarter inch. Paper folds created another alignment issue. It seems the outside layer requires a bit more paper than the inside layer for all edges to align properly. Printing on a copy weight paper improved results.

I kept trying to adjust the margins and column widths, then ended up doing a cut and paste the old fashioned way (scissors and tape) with Jim Villani at the Pig Iron Press before running off hard copies. They were fun to pass out at poetry readings.

I forgot all about making chapbooks until a couple weeks ago, when the idea of using GIMP for the layout popped into my head.  It worked. So, I updated the back cover and here it is… the very first in a series of mini chapbooks available as a pdf so anyone who desires a free copy can print and fold their own.

Is the alignment perfect?

No, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.  It’s a frikkin piece of folded paper. Chapbooks are not meant to be perfect. The intent is to distribute words (poems or little stories, with or without illustrations) in a fun, economical, and tangible manner.

If anyone else is doing this, please let me know… it would be fun to collect chapbooks.

Thanks for reading!