New addition to our online store purveys books directly and indirectly proceeding from The Chap stable.
In the beginning, The Chap was a slim pamphlet only available in strange little bookshops that have since closed down or become chain stores. Once the publication began reaching the attention of more than a handful of peculiar people, thanks to extensive media coverage, certain discerning book publishers came a-knocking on The Chap’s door, asking us to produce a weightier tome than our gentlemen’s gazette.
The first of these, published in 2001 when The Chap had only been in existence for two years, was The Chap Manifesto, published by 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins. This opening salvo in book form declared itself to offer ‘Revolutionary Etiquette for the Modern Gentleman’, and it did precisely that, in the form of many amusing tracts illustrated by The Chap’s then-art director and co-author Vic Darkwood. After that came The Chap Almanac, a more esoteric follow-up in 2002 also published by 4th Estate.
The third offering from HarperCollins was Around the World in 80 Martinis, a spoof travel journal following in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg. This was the first Chap Book to offer readers entirely original content, rather than a repackaging of earlier content from the magazine (although both Manifesto and Almanac both contained a generous helping of new material never published in magazine form). A change of publisher to Macmillan produced The Best of The Chap in 2005, being a Beano annual-style collection from the first four years of the magazine’s publication, assembled within a hardcover format.
But before all those books were published, where had the inspiration for The Chap come from in the first place? The answer lies in our new shop category, Chap Books. Here one will find, along with rare, out-of-print signed editions of the original Chap spin-off books, antiquarian editions of some of the books that inspired the founders of The Chap. From Stephen Potter’s One-Upmanship series to sui generis tomes on menswear such as Nik Cohn’s Today There Are No Gentlemen, and books on dandyism that were published hot on the heels of The Chap’s popularity, this is a carefully curated collection of Chap Books.
Later additions to The Chap canon came in the form of Am I a Chap, a slender hardback collating the best of the magazine’s Am I Chap? sections and adding some sartorial advice and history to the mix as well. Then came How To Be Chap, the publication’s first ‘coffee-table’ type book, a weighty chronicle of the magazine’s history, its people and its participation in the public domain in the form of The Chap Olympiad and our various protests.
The next phase of literary output came in the form of collaborations with experts, the first being Cooking For Chaps with Clare Gabett-Mulhallen, published in 2013 by Kyle Books, who then also published Drinking For Chaps, co-authored by drinks writer Olly Smith, in 2015. Most of these original books, now sadly out of print, are available from our new Chap Books department, along with some of the inspirational tomes mentioned above, and new stock is added weekly.
You may also find what you are looking for in our AbeBooks emporium
