Remove Chapter Number from Header--Memoir Class

Question

I'm working in the memoir class using A6. For this format, I want to remove both the word "Chapter" from the default memoir page heading style as well as the chapter number, so that only the chapter title is included in the header. Removing the word "chapter" can be achieved by adding the following after \begin{Document}:

\renewcommand{\chaptername}{}

But the chapter number remains in the page header. I added this command:

\renewcommand\printchapternonum{}

but it had no effect.

What is a quick and easy way to remove the chapter number from the header? I looked at the fancyhdr package and there is conflict with memoir; similarly, I tried changing to scrbook but there were errors (baseline skip already defined).

There has to be a simple way of doing this.

[Later]

Thank you everyone for your helpful answers.

Answer 1

The proper memoir way of doing this

\addtopsmarks{headings}{}{
  \createmark{chapter}{left}{nonumber}{}{}
}
\pagestyle{headings} % activate changes

there is no need to try to figure out how the internals work or that sort of thing.

You might want to read http://tug.org/pracjourn/2008-2/madsen/

Answer 2

You can redefine \chaptermark:

\documentclass{memoir}
\usepackage{lipsum}% just to generate text for the example

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\chaptermark[1]{%
  \markboth{\MakeUppercase{#1}}{}
}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\chapter{Test chapter}
\lipsum[1-10]

\end{document}

An image of the header on page two:

Uppercased text is not really pleasing, so perhaps you could use small caps instead:

\documentclass{memoir}
\usepackage{lipsum}% just to generate text for the example

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\chaptermark[1]{%
  \markboth{\textsc{#1}}{}
}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\chapter{Test chapter}
\lipsum[1-10]

\end{document}

Answer 3

With a twoside style, the \chaptermark command is defined as

> \chaptermark=macro:
#1->\@setclcnt {chapter}{@memmarkcntra}\advance \c@@memmarkcntra \m@ne \markboth 
{\memUChead {\ifnum \c@secnumdepth > \c@@memmarkcntra \if@mainmatter \@nameuse 
{chaptermarksn}{\@chapapp \ \@nameuse {thechapter}. \ }\fi \fi #1}}{}.

It's not easy to find the definition in memoir.cls, because it's modified during processing the class code, so I used \show\chaptermark.

The solution is then easy by looking at the definition of \chaptermarksn which just uses its argument:

\renewcommand{\chaptermarksn}[1]{}

because the chapter tag and number are passed as arguments to it.

Example

\documentclass{memoir}

\renewcommand\chaptermarksn[1]{}

\begin{document}

\tableofcontents*
\chapter{Test Chapter}
\section{Test Section}
\lipsum[1-20]
\end{document}