‘The back cover represents the past. The spine represents the present. The front cover represents the future.’

Stephen Emmerson, How to Read a Book, 2025

How To Read A Book is an exhibition concerned with language, writing, and memory. It also explores themes of neurodiversity, including dyslexia, by offering visitors an alternative way of approaching books and text.

Applying methods found in palmistry to lines found on the covers of well-read paperback books, this exhibition is an invitation to make art out of the everyday.

Also featured are a selection of images from The universe of books, The book farm, and other works centred around language, the book, and the limits of poetry.

On display alongside some of the Portico Library’s historic collection, including our beautifully illustrated Paradise Lost (1688) by John Milton and Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830).

We invite you to explore books in a different way: to read through feeling a decaying book, to read through drawing the line of a book, to ask what is a hero – is Lucifer damned or damning?, to ask what can books can tell us about us? What is reading anyway?

Stephen Emmerson is a writer and artist. His most recent publications are: flight, published by Guillemot Press, Big Song, published by Broken Sleep Books, and Gallery and A Box of Ideas, both published by Timglaset Editions.