Read with Team Allport, One Dog-Eared Page at a Time (no wait –we have bookmarks!)
At Allport Editions, we’re big believers in the power of the written word, whether it’s stamped on a greeting card, scribbled in a notebook, or pressed between the pages of a well-loved book. We asked the readers on our team to share their favorite books (they were all sad to find out they could only pick 3). True to form, our answers ranged from the poetic to the absurd, the classic to the cozy. Basically, if our office were a library, it would have its own wing for emotional devastation and another just for misfit geniuses.
Based on their bookshelves, here’s a lovingly unscientific analysis of some of my brilliant co-workers. Get to know them the best way I know how: through the stories they return to, recommend, and pretend they don’t quietly build their personalities around.
At Allport: Robin handles wholesale accounts and outreach with a blend of efficiency and charm. Whether she’s crafting marketing emails or managing customer relationships, she brings insight, clarity, and a great sense of timing to the sales department. She also writes some of the funniest headlines I've ever read and is the proud dog-mom of Zoe, one of the resident office dogs with an expertise in “not giving you the ball” and consuming snacks.
Bookshelf Reads Like: A noir soul with a sharp eye and a sharper mind, someone who reads moral ambiguity by night and probably solved the neighborhood mystery before the police report was filed. These shelves are precise, a little haunted, and full of sentences that could cut glass. There’s elegance here, but also a willingness to sit with discomfort, to name the unspoken thing in the room, and maybe send a thank you card after.
The Dead Don’t Need Reminding by Julian Randall – A memoir-in-verse that reads like grief braided into gospel. Randall excavates Black boyhood, queerness, masculinity, and memory with a lyrical clarity that demands you stay present, even when it hurts. There are ghosts here (literal and figurative) but none of them are passive. They call back. They press on the spine of every line.
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion – Cool, dry despair under a desert sun. Maria Wyeth isn’t unraveling…she’s observing the unraveling with perfect detachment, like she’s already memorized the script. It’s about emptiness and image, and how pretending not to care becomes its own kind of armor. Didion writes like she’s chiseling each sentence from marble, and every page makes you feel like you’ve swallowed sand. Beautiful, brutal, and way too honest about what it costs to go numb.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote – The blueprint for literary true crime, written with a level of control that’s somehow more disturbing than the murder itself. Capote’s account of a Kansas family’s murder is so meticulously crafted, it’s easy to forget you’re reading about real people. That’s part of the horror: the beauty of the language, the cool detachment, the fact that you can’t look away. Every detail is too well lit, every sentence too perfect. It’s part journalism, part gothic, part moral Rorschach test, and reading it feels like being complicit in something you can’t quite name.
What I’ve realized while putting this together is that our reading lives are just as different and beautiful as the cards we sell. We love books that ask hard questions, make us laugh unexpectedly, or just remind us that connection is what we’re all here for, whether through words, worlds, or wildly specific lore.
So grab something from your shelf… or better yet, someone else’s (support your local library & independent bookstores), and sink into a story. Revisit a favorite, get haunted by footnotes, cry about marshes, spiral over moral philosophy, or finally figure out what’s actually happening in Flatland (if you do, please report back). Read along with the bookish weirdos at Allport Editions, including myself, who is currently finishing Wolfskin by Juliet Marillier (Think Viking blood oaths, ancient Pictish mythology, and star crossed friends) and using this post as an excuse to sneak in one last book recommendation. You’re welcome.
Stay tuned, you’ll get to know more of the fabulous Team that makes up Allport Editions! I might be biased, but I think they’re pretty awesome.
Until next time,
Sam