Our Blog

Writing poetry isn't really a talent of mine—unless you count humorous/sarcastic haikus and "Roses Are Red" variants—but I do randomly stack books to create sentences and mini-mini short stories. Then I discovered that this a Thing: spine poetry! Naturally, I got sucked into the Internet and bounced from Pinterest to Tumblr to blog posts filled with books stacked and photographed to create a poem. 

So for no reason at all and with no prize promised, I challenged myself to see how many sentences I could create with the books in my office. My self-imposed rules were no title repetition and only using print books on my shelves. Here's what I came up with.

Deep in the shade of paradise, when you are engulfed in flames, this book will save your life.

It’s pretty common for today’s media to have suggested hashtags so we can join the community of fans talking about a (theoretically) shared experience.  You see them in movie trailers.  They pop-up on your screen multiple times during your favorite TV show.  And even books will often include a suggested hashtag on the back cover.

Recently, I’ve seen a ton of posts that posit what it might look like if classic TV show XYZ had suggested hashtags.  My favorite one is for Friends.  So I started wondering what it would look like if our favorite classic works of literature had similarly suggested Twitter hashtags…  

Here at Quirk, #we #love #Twitter. (Psst. Come follow us!) So we're incredibly excited to have three Quirk writers participating in the #TwitterFiction Festival 2014: Ben H. Winters (The Last Policeman), Ian Doescher (William Shakespeare's Star Wars), and Eric Smith (The Geek's Guide to Dating).

Read on to find out more and learn how you can write your own #TwitterFiction!

National Craft Month continues with a truly intense craft: The Creepy Monkey from Creepy Cute Crochet: Zombies, Ninjas, Robots, and More! This is not a craft for beginners—it’s as tough and unforgiving as March. But if you’re a crafter, you’re not afraid of a challenge! And besides, this monkey is so darned cute I’ll leap at any opportunity to share it.

The world needs more of these sweet little monkeys. Make them!

(image via the awesome Blue Willow Books)

Shopping in a bookstore is a bit like shopping at a hardware store: if you’re there for something specific, you need to know a thing or two about the item you’re looking for before attempting to find it in the aisles. If you’re there to browse, the world is your oyster.

As a bookseller, I’ve often heard people ask for a book they saw several weeks ago, on that table near the café (you know the one!), that had a blue cover. But lots books go on display every week, on many tables, and some of those books were published two, five, ten years ago! Feeling helpless and apologetic, all I can do is point out general sections of the store where they might find a blue book. So to correct future sadness, arm yourself with bookstore etiquette and prepare to fill your arms with all the books you could ever want!