This collection of bookish poetry (224 pages) was published in September of 2022 by Harper Design. The book takes you to bookshop shelves. David read Spine Poems and loved it; it wouldn't be on our site if he didn't recommend it.
Bookshop.org is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community.
This is a birthday cake slice of a book: delightful, colorful, short, and satisfying. And it might just encourage you to interact with your own bookshelves in a new way.
Author Annette Dauphin Simon is a children’s author, creative director, and former bookseller — she was also named Best Artist in kindergarent and won her school’s Fire Prevention Week. Now she inspires readers to discover the poems on the bookshelves around them.
At some point, Simon began to amuse herself by stacking up the spines of books to transform their titles into poetry. She discovers connections that were previously hidden from view by pesky notions like alphabetical order and genre.
So, for instance, the book A Little History of Poetry begins a stack that includes the biography Your Voice in My Head and the memoir Floating in a Most Peculiar Way. And boom! There’s a poem:
Some are funny:
Some of them are sweet:
All of poetry is embellished with photos of the book stack that forms the spine poems, along with the authors and artists of the featured books, literary quotes, fun facts, and other bookish goodies.
The photos and poems are affecting and entertaining, but the best part might be the inspiration to make poems of your own. You could go to a used bookstore and create spine poems for other people to find. Or look for hidden poems in your own bookshelves. You might visit a bookshop, buy a stack of books simply because they make a great poem, and then read those books to discover what’s inside.
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