Chapbook for Superbloom 2024

Small run of printed material published by Lyndsey Ingram

Chapbook (+ London Map)

Layout designed with Herman Lelie and Stefania Bonelli

Chapbooks are an old tradition of cheaply made pamphlets assembled from loose sheets of paper. The first chapbook is recorded in 1824, and the term seemingly derives from chapman, the word for the itinerant salesmen who would sell such books.

The first element of chapman comes in turn from Old English cēap ‘barter’, ‘business’, ‘dealing’. from which the modern adjective cheap was ultimately derived. My book published by Lyndsey Ingram was distributed free of charge as part of the cross-London multi-media body of work I made in June 2024. The title of this body of work was Superbloom.

The form is old fashioned and earnest, which is what I liked about it. T.S. Eliot famously published his poetry in chapbooks before switching to longer forms, and Ted Hughes for example published his “Animal Poems” in 1964 as a chapbook.

Chapbooks are made all over the world. The Spanish call them literatura Cordel, and the French bibliothèque bleue ‘blue library’ literature, because they were often wrapped in the cheap blue paper more commonly reserved as a wrapping for sugar. Chapbooks are called Volksbuch ‘people’s book’ in German, and as pliegos sueltos ‘loose sheets’ in Spanish. Lubok in Russian.

My chapbook has colour illustrations and explains the motivation for the cross disciplinary body of work Superbloom, including a film, an immersive art show with mirrored floor, a citywide series of written interventions and a mapping project. The ambitious large scale project ended up at Glastonbury Festival in a collaboration with the displaced ladies of Oshana in the Lebanon, who made crochet flowers in to a beautiful works that were installed there, plus a second mapping project with postcards printed on seed paper that could be taken home and planted. The idea is that the banners will be added to as the years carry on.

The accompanying map was repurposed from a previous project for London Underground with the Saatchi Gallery and the International Management Group IMG. (This London Underground mapping project was cancelled by the outbreak of COVID 19. We were literally going to print on the Monday of the lockdown announcement.)

Locations all over London were scattered with blooms. Superbloom was a project celebrating resilience and the energy of human potential. It honoured the work of UNHCR, Oshana and other organisations working to welcome and make life more easy for refugees and asylum seekers in the UK and other places in the world.