Presumably, your publisher will also want all these poems and stories in a single document. In that case, probably the best approach would be to create such a document with the required page layout, then simply copy & paste the content from each of the existing documents into the new one, pasting as unformatted text in the desired order. You can re-apply the required paragraph formatting via the appropriate use of Styles. It's up to you whether you do all the copying/pasting first, then apply the Styles, or copy/paste a single document, then apply the Styles before copying/pasting the next document. Either way, with only 40-50 documents to process, the task shouldn't be too onerous. If you use Word's heading Styles for the titles, Word can also use those to build a Table of Contents at the front of the combined document.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]