Spine Poetry

Think "spine poetry." Now close your eyes. What comes to mind? Turns out you're supposed to take book titles as printed on book spines and arrange them in a stack so that they can be read as poems.

Spine poetry is the creation of artist Nina Katchadourian, who began her "Sorted Books" project in 1993 and just published, with Brian Dillon, twenty years of her own images in Sorted Books (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013).

I first heard about spine poetry during National Poetry Month, April, when the local city library I volunteer at had a brief presentation introducing the "Spine Art" installation at the Library of Congress. (Although I would like very much to create timely posts, for example, a just-pre-April post to coincide with National Poetry Month or the "Spine Art" installation, I'm not sure I can commit to that. And then, where does it end? Do I write a themed post for every calendar event in the fields of Literature and Language? You see the dilemma.)

My musings on spine poetry: First note that a picture person, not a word person, came up with it. A lovely idea, very fun, according to which books become objects, just like they do when interior decorators arrange books on the coffee table by cover photo or on the bookshelf by color or size.

Objects as opposed to what?  Of course books are objects. But they are, and especially were, also the keepers and purveyors of civilization. And the more we are aware of that, as we are during a time of extreme change, the more books also become objects, whether to be collected, published in attractive series (like Penguin's modestly priced "Hardcover Classics'), cannibalized (as by publishers who depart from the 500-year-old principles of book design by placing an index, for example, with the front matter), or used as building blocks for structures or works of art.

We (civilization, such as it is at this point) are in the midst of a change of untold proportions in moving our print archives to the Internet. Assuming, that is, that we can keep track of the technology, a nagging problem for those of us who have lived through the transition from slides to celluloid film to digital "film" or records to tapes to dvds.