In Poèmes Fabuleux, Marjolein Blom (NL) explores the closure of an antiquarian bookshop in Middelburg (NL). The shop serves as the starting point for an investigation into the value of chance encounters, physical experiences, and material knowledge in an increasingly digital world.

For forty years, antiquarian shopowner Fred Duivenvoorde offered a space where visitors could wander among an eclectic collection of books, ranging from historical volumes to forgotten bargain-bin finds. With the disappearance of this place, not only a shop was lost, but also a physical environment that encouraged unplanned and tactile forms of discovery. Poèmes Fabuleux approaches the collection as a temporary universe: a constellation of stories, images, and ideas that have passed through many hands, carrying traces of human curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge.

Rather than documenting the shop as it once was, the publication presents an artistic reinterpretation of its collection and atmosphere. Blom’s intervention brings together photographs made inside the antiquarian bookshop, printed onto pages taken from books that were otherwise destined to be discarded. These photographs are combined with illustrations from the collection, creating unexpected encounters between image, text and material. Like the eclectic collection of the antiquarian bookshop itself, Poèmes Fabuleux becomes a layered object which invites readers to wander, make connections, and discover meaning without a predetermined path.