We're celebrating Reading this month in honor of World Book Day, 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. To celebrate National Reading Month, 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: Marian runs our towel press and personally prints, folds, and packs each and every tea towel that leaves our studio. Her process is hands on and detail oriented, bringing artistry and care to a deceptively humble product.
Bookshelf Analysis: A mythology nerd with main-character energy and sharp observational instincts. Someone who loves power plays, ancient grudges, and a little mystery in her mythmaking. Her shelves are full of stories where the stakes are high, the secrets run deep, and nobody gets out unchanged. There’s a taste for drama and characters who scheme, seduce, and survive, but also for the quiet moments where someone realizes the world isn’t what they thought it was.
A Painted House by John Grisham – Grisham dials down the legal drama and turns his attention to a slow simmering childhood in 1950s Arkansas, where a seven-year-old boy watches the myth of family and decency start to quietly splinter. The story is soaked in cotton fields and small-town routine, but the real tension lives underneath in the unspoken violence, the shame, the secrets everyone’s already agreed to pretend not to see. It’s a book about what we’re willing to gloss over to keep the peace, and what happens when a child starts noticing the cracks. Quiet, aching, and deceptively sharp.
The Dark Olympus Series by Katee Robert –Greek mythology but make it messy, modern, and NSFW. This series reimagines the gods as CEOs, mob bosses, and power players tangled up in schemes, grudges, and very complicated personal relationships. Think “Percy Jackson grew up, got therapy, and started attending ethically questionable galas.” The gods are hot, the stakes are high, and the power dynamics are messier than any HR department could handle. Mythology, but with more bite (and a lot more leather).
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens – Part murder mystery, part coming of age story, part love letter to the marsh. Kya “the Marsh Girl” grows up in near total isolation, raising herself in the wild after being abandoned by pretty much everyone. The book unfolds like a memory: poetic, heavy with atmosphere, and aching with the tension between solitude and belonging. It’s about girlhood, and survival, and what it means to build a life from the edges of the world. The prose is dreamy but never soft. Like the marsh itself, it knows how to protect what it loves.
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.
This month, 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). You could also check out our Book Lover's Collection ;)
So, Happy World Book Day from some of the bookish weirdos at Allport Editions, including myself, who is currently reading the 3rd installment of The Library Trilogy: The Book The Held Her Heart by Mark Lawrence (a tightly plotted fantasy about a timeless library, and time itself) and using this post as an excuse to sneak in one last book recommendation. You’re welcome.
Stay tuned, where 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