Reading Copy Book Blog

This is the way this poem should always sound. Goosebumps. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. ” ‘Tis some visitor,” [...]

Remember our March Madness Battle of the Beautiful Books? Well, we have an interview with the poet whose book “The Crow’s Vow” won the whole enchilada. Read on to learn more about the lovely and bird-crazy Susan Briscoe. And I came across another book today which reminded me that two designs, while very similar when [...]

Celebrating National Poetry Month with book spine poetry.

It’s exactly 100 days until the opening of the London Olympics and the event needs poets, according to the BBC. They are short of 20 poets for a cultural event featuring a poet from every nation competing in the 2012 Olympics. Apparently, they still need poets from places like Mali and Liberia. I suspect Mali’s [...]

The love letters between poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning have been digitized and can now be viewed online.

Happy Robbie Burns Day – enjoy perusing these collectible copies of Robert Burns’ works.

I am biased but AbeBooks is a treasure trove. Yesterday, I came across this amazing item. You would only find it by searching for “avant garde steam locomotive” hence my eagerness to showcase this undated leporello from Russia’s Soviet era. A leporello is a single sheet of paper that has been folded several times. Some [...]

A stunning example of a Cosway binding (a leather-bound book whose cover is inlaid with miniature portraits), Evangeline by Longfellow has miniatures inlaid on the back cover as well.

Found in a West Virginia library inside a 1561 copy of Chaucer was a 450 year old erotic love poem from a Catholic woman named Lady Elizabeth Dacre wrote an erotic (at least for the time) love poem in Latin to a Protestant man Sir Anthony Cooke who happened to be the tutor to King [...]

Letter from Charles Bukowski, outlining his terms to give a poetry reading.