The Book of a Thousand Poems
a classic anthology for children
first collected by J. Murray Macbain · 1942
A thousand and eleven poems of English verse, in eighteen subjects, the
text taken from sixteen volumes on Project Gutenberg — the Mother Goose
books, A Child's Garden of Verses, Blake's Songs, Lear's
Nonsense, The Golden Treasury and the rest. Every poem in
it belongs to everyone.
Finding your way. The painting on the cover is the way in, and
nothing on it is labelled. Press the book in her hands for the
contents; press the butterfly to search; press her face for a poem at
random; press the fawn's nose for this page. Below the painting are the
eighteen subjects. On every other page the same four stand in the bar
at the top, with the house to go back to the cover, ⚄ for a poem at
random, and − and + to make the type smaller or larger. Swipe sideways
to turn the page. Under every poem’s title a line asks Who was
the poet: press it to read who they were and how they wrote, and to
find their other poems in this book.
The glosses. Every word can be tapped. The glosses come from an
offline dictionary, with four hundred and four written by hand: the old
grammar of English verse, the Scots of Burns and the ballads, and the
words where the dictionary answers with a sense the poem does not mean.
A word it can only guess at is left saying nothing, or called a name —
a wrong gloss is worse than none.
The voices. Eight hundred and thirty-five of the poems are read
aloud: eight hundred and twenty-six by LibriVox volunteers, who record
public-domain books and give them away, two more by a reader on YouTube
who put them under a licence that lets anyone pass them on, and the rest
in this app; the reader is named under the play button, and beside the
name is where the reading came from, which is a link to it. Pressing ▶ starts
a breath before the first line and stops at the end of the poem, and
the bar under it is this poem's and not the whole track's. On the other
one hundred and seventy-six the ▶ beside a line is the phone speaking,
not a person.
Your own readings. Beside the title of every poem nobody has read
aloud there is a hollow star, and pressing it opens a recorder along
the foot of the page, with the poem still above it to read from. It
asks who is reading, and that name is the credit under the play
button once the reading is in the book. A
reading is sent to this book’s own store, where the maker’s computer
listens to it first — a false start is cut out, and a poem not read
through is not used — and then matches it to the lines; from then on
it is that poem’s reading in every copy of the book, and the star
goes. The poems still waiting stand first in every subject, so a
subject opens on its stars; a star fills on every phone the moment
anyone’s reading of the poem reaches the store, the reading can be
played under the title from then on, and the poem is not offered to
be read again — so no two people read the same one. Anyone with
this book can read a poem into it, so if you have a voice to give,
give it: the poems with a hollow star are the ones still waiting,
and the button under the painting on the cover takes you to one of
them at random.
Made for one reader.