What if the titles on a bookshelf were not just labels, but verses of a poem? In Comment lire a bookshelf in einem Buch, Sadie Plant transforms an old telephone booth on a train platform in Biel into a glowing cabinet full of words. The books – found, gifted, left behind – are not arranged so that they can be read in sequence, but so that they can be taken in at a glance, their spines forming 20 short poems.

The images of these stacks are accompanied by the poems as well as texts by Plant and Anne König reflecting on the origins of the work and the everyday poetry hidden in plain sight. What began as an installation about lost and found books becomes a new book in its own right, a multi-layered meditation on reading, language and chance encounters.

Author Sadie Plant arranged the titles of found or discarded books in such a way that they form idiosyncratic poems. At the book launch, she will explain how she came up with this enchanting idea and how it turned into a book itself.

Information transmitted via the culturoscoPe