In Poèmes Fabuleux, Marjolein Blom (NL) explores the closure of an antiquarian bookshop in Middelburg (NL). The shop is 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, the antiquarian shopowner offered a space where visitors could wander among an eclectic collection of books, from historical volumes to forgotten bargain-bin finds. With its disappearance, not only a shop was lost but a physical environment that encouraged unplanned and tactile forms of discovery. The book 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 was, the publication presents an artistic reinterpretation of its collection and atmosphere. Photographs made inside the bookshop are printed onto pages taken from books otherwise destined to be discarded and combined with illustrations from the collection, creating unexpected encounters between image, text and material. Like the shop itself, Poèmes Fabuleux becomes a layered object that invites readers to wander, make connections and discover meaning without a predetermined path.