pocketbook

plural pocketbooks · alternative pocket-book · alternative pocket book

1. NortheasternUSA purse or handbag.
2. datedA wallet for paper money.
3. figurativelyOne's personal budget or financial capacity; the amount one can afford.

   Synonyms: pocket

4. A small book, particularly (US) a paperback or (UK) notebook able to fit into a pocket (of any genre, from reference work to fine art).

   The publishers brought out small format pocketbooks of the whole of their nature series.

   5 more examples

   The pocket books are in trouble. A creeping extralegal censorship threatens to bowdlerize the product[…]

   1955, “The Harassed Pocket-Book Publishers”, in The Antioch Review

   By 1482 the printing capital of the world was Venice, and the busiest printer there was a man called Aldus Manutius who used to have a sign outside his shop saying 'If you would speak to Aldus, hurry — time presses'. He had good reason. No single printer did more to spread the printed word than he. Aldus knew that his market, and the market of all printers, lay not in the production of expensive, commissioned editions of the Bible or the Psalms, but in an inexpensive format that could easily be carried in a man's saddlebag wherever he went. So Aldus made his books small, and cheap. The Aldine Editions, as his new format was called, were the world's first pocket books, and they sold faster than he could produce them. Nearly half his workers were Greeks, exiles or refugees from the Byzantine Empire after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. So it was that with the help of his translator-craftsmen, Aldus began the task of translating the Greek classics. When he died, in 1515, no major known Greek authors remained to be translated. Whatever happened in the Greek world, Aldus had ensured that the classical authors would not once again be lost to the West, as they had after the fall of Rome.

   1978, James Burke, Connections, Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 105

   The kit is produced in three parts including a pocket book designed to fit into a shirt pocket for everyday on-the-job use, a more detailed guide and a training CD. The kit includes a hazard reporting and feedback notebook and hazard management process prompt cards to remind workers of common hazards they may encounter in day-to-day operations.

   c. 2005, New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Risk Management Pocket Guide

   "I have now lost", he wrote in his pocketbook, "the last barrier between me and death..."

   2011, Leslie Stephen, Swift, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 10

   Dave recorded the information in his pocketbook and looked Gibbs straight in the eye.

   2015, Graham Ison, Whispering Grass, Hachette UK, →ISBN

   1. PhilippinesbroadlyA romance novel published as a small paperback.