If there is a church for my particular bent of irreligion, this is it.

I had a rough day so, I’m just gonna stare at this a while, ya mind?

via boekendingen blog

Dimensions
By Lee Kirk

Fold a sheet for Folio.
Fold again to make a Quarto:
four leaves, eight pages, don’t you know –
Another fold yields Octavo.

But what booksellers really prize is
how these folds relate to sizes..
It’s kind of shorthand, don’t you see –
for clarity and brevity.

Some think that we are too effete
or somehow trying to be elite –
but what if, instead of 16mo, 24mo, and 32mo
we wrote sextodecimo, vigesimoquarto, and trigesimosecundo?

Lee Kirk – The Prints and the the Paper

available to download in its entirety from Google Books

Ben Jonson
“To My Bookseller”

THOU that mak’st gain thy end, and wisely well,
Call’st a book good, or bad, as it doth sell,
Use mine so too ; I give thee leave ; but crave,
For the luck’s sake, it thus much favor have,
To lie upon thy stall, till it be sought ;
Not offered, as it made suit to be bought ;
Nor have my title-leaf on posts or walls,
Or in cleft-sticks, advanced to make calls
For termers, or some clerk-like serving-man,
Who scarce can spell thy hard names ; whose knight less can.
If without these vile arts it will not sell,
Send it to Bucklersbury, there ‘t will well.

[image thanks to Sarah's Books blog]

“Saved by the Bell”

Full calf and quaintly tooled I stood
Upon an honored shelf
With Grandmama’s possessions rare,
‘Midst Sandwich glass and Deift;
And there I would be still, I guess,
If she had lived my hide to bless
With gentle daily sweet caress.
But people die, and I live on,
Forever, so it seems,
While poverty destroys at will
Fond memories and dreams
Of those who lived and loved a book,
And treasured it in snug, safe nook
Where no one else would think to look.
Into a carton, attic bound,
I went and generations passed;
Then to the woodshed, worthless trash — And finally, at sad long last
Into the paper drive. They threw
More than a book, but no one knew,
Till a bookworm read and found the clue.

So still my carcass is intact,
For scribbled on my pages
A diary Grandmama had found
Preserved there for the ages:
Grandfather fought with Washington,
His diary told of Arnold’s gun
And Independence fairly won.
Full calf and quaintly tooled I stand
In a National Archives air-proof case.
No longer now can human hand
Dust and caress my time-worn face.
And so it seems that money must
Alone preserve from worthless dust
Small facts that are a sacred trust.
But for the curious bookworm humble,
About whose ethics many grumble,
Obituary this might be,
And none would ever know but me!

L.B.

Please Bury Me in the Library

Please bury me in the library
In clean, well-lighted stacks
Of Novels, History, Poetry,
Right next to the Paperbacks,

Where the Kids’ Books dance
With True Romance
And the Dictionary dozes.
Please bury me in the library
With a dozen long-stemmed proses.

Way back by a rack of Magazines,
I won’t be sad too often,
If they bury me in the library
With Bookworms in my coffin.

“Yankee Barometer”

We buy a hundred books a day by mail, o.p. and rare,
We sell as many as we can and in the packing lair
We save the cartons sound and clean,
The papers, cardboards, brown or green
To use again, lest unforeseen,
Another shortage intervene and leave out cupboard bare.

When papers, cartons, boxes, wraps, leave me no path to tread,
I know that business isn’t good, we must be in the red;
But when in this small packing nook,
I only have to take one look
To see there’s naught to pack one book,
I smile – this I can overlook, and buy supplies instead.

- Lawrence Romaine

I wonder who is writing e-commerce poetry?