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So, P&PC just finished reading Edgar A. Guest: A Biography —Royce Howes's very swell, 1953 account of the one-time Detroit Free Press copy boy who went on, in Horatio Alger fashion, to become the most prolific and popular poet in U.S. history. We're certainly no stranger to Guest—check out an Edgar Guest Calendar here , Chrysler's Edgar Guest television spot here , and a scrapbook full of Guest's poetry here —but the biography stunned us nevertheless. Yes, in telling the story of how Guest's "ascent to fame has kept absolute step with Detroit's march from provincial city to industrial capital of the world," Howes is possibly even more saccharine than the "people's poet" himself was, but the facts are simply astonishing. Consider, for example: Guest wrote a poem a day seven days a week for thirty years. He lived in a mansion "staffed with servants, fine automobiles, the so-handy golf club [and] the big summer place at the Pointe...

Is it possible that popular poetry's most companionable print platform from the modern era is not the book or little magazine but the card—the greeting card (more here ), business card (more here and here ), postcard , calling card, game card , stereoview card (more here and here ), remembrance card, funeral card, cabinet card, arcade card, and advertising trade card (another here ), all of which forms regularly featured poems ranging from sappy holiday wishes and elegies to self-promotional verses and, in the case of arcade cards and some business cards, naughty rhymes ? Last week, P&PC brought you a set of poetry trading cards from the 1920s, and this week we're happy to present the "Game of Poems," an attractively illustrated deck of 52 playing cards issued by the Fireside Game Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1898. From 1895 to 1905 or so, the Fireside Game Company (and its successor, the Cincinnati Game Company) issued more than 35 educational card ga...