Centuries ago, you couldn’t run to the store or place an online order for overnight delivery. Instead, people would buy goods from the chapman, a traveling peddler of various merchandise. This is how the word “chapbook” — a small book or pamphlet containing popular stories, treatises, or nursery rhymes — developed. Books were precious (and expensive) material, but a chapbook was lower quality and easier to pass along. Today, chapbooks are still popular for poets and writers to self-publish and distribute their work. A more modern name for a chapbook is “zine,” an abbreviation of “magazine” — “a noncommercial, often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter.”