The concept of book spine poetry appeared in 1993 with Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project. Katchadourian began collecting interesting titles and arranging them in clusters so the spines could be read like a sentence(s) or poem.
Katchadourian’s Sorted Book Project manages to become more than an experiment in medium. Her playful photographed poems are sometimes cleverly arranged jokes or amusing images, but at other times, they are short and stunning thoughts on the nature of art and artists. You can see all the series at her website.
The poetry (or rather the story, as I would like to call it) with book spines should be read as:
Dear John,
Before I Say Good-Bye, We Need to Talk about Kevin.
He is Forever Odd and Absolutely Nuts. In fact has gone Far beyond the Dead End.
F?@k Knows (which means, I don’t know), is The Helpline, the answer?
27 Responses
That’s a nice one. I like it 🙂
Thanks Nish! 🙂
It’s probably just as well you don’t know that that one book means. It’s not a very ‘nice’ expression. I love your little story that goes along with the spines, though. :O)
Oops! I do know what it means 😛 It means exactly that 😛
Glad you liked the story with spines, LuAnn 🙂
Interesting ! You have managed to make sense out of it..
Thks Ma’am!
Wow… this is so nice!! Hats off Shilpa 🙂 🙂
Thanks Shalini 🙂
Amazing! Another one of those things (including a Haiku) that I just cannot get the hang of.
Haiku is not my cup of tea too! Spine Poetry is fun, I think it would be awesome composing in a library or a book store!
Loove the Spine poetry:)
Thank you Vishal 🙂
I love the idea of spine poetry!
Ever since I first saw it somewhere, I’ve begun to arrange my bookshelf like that! 😀
Wow! How cool is that 🙂
This is lovely and it must be difficult to collect the right titles and then compose poetry or make a sentence.
I do it with the books I have in my library cupboard. Thinking of a story with spines and then arranging for the book (buying or borrowing) may never happen with me. 😛
I love spine poetry, was introduced to it during the AtoZ blog challenge a couple of years ago. Loved yours too.
I love it too… stimulates the mind and plus I love the feeling of really looking at my books 😀
wah wah!! kya baat!
Dhanyawaad hai ji aapka 😀
very creative, i must try this once.
You must, Asha! Looking forward to your poetry with books 🙂
Love your spine poetry’s. I should try this one… 🙂
Go ahead and create some awesome spine stories, Sheethal 🙂
This is the first time I came across book spine poetry. I looked through your other posts on this and truly loved the way you compose each time.
p.s. I’m going to try this out with due credit to you 🙂
Am glad you liked the spine poetry here, Uma!
I saw yours and it was a cool one. Way to go 🙂
nice , i didnt know about spine poetry till now!
Nice blog you have here!