When my lady friend and I were visiting my sister and her youngest daughter in Lewes, Delaware (a favorite weekend getaway spot for Washingtonians) this past weekend, we wandered into downtown Lewes, I saw, catty corner from where we were waiting for niece and her friend to join us, Biblion: Used Books and Rare Finds.

I was so excited to see such a pleasant looking bookstore, the immediately ran to it in such a way that my friend and my sister were convinced that I had seen an old friend (or so they told me later; it would explain why they waited so long to look for me – they wanted to give me time to chat with my presumed friend).

Bibilion is not a particularly large nor widely stocked bookstore. They opt for clean lines and neatness over stacks upon piles of books up to the ceiling. But the selection is good and well curated. Most books tended to be priced at five dollars, which is, perhaps, on the high side, but well within the pale for a decent paperback in good condition.

I nearly purchased Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, but while looking through their small poetry section (it’s a mixture of poetry and drama and mostly contains editions of individual Shakespeare plays), I saw Black  Poets, an anthology of African American poetry, edited by Dudley Randall.

My knowledge of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance is limited, but that being something I wanted to fix and since Black  Poets has a nice selection from Harlem Renaissance and the book also being just $2.50, or half of what A Room of One’s Own or costs (and, indeed, half of what most every book I picked up cost), I bought it.

Inside were half a dozen poems by Frank Horne.

Haven’t heard of Frank Horne? Don’t feel too bad. Neither had I until that day.

In his non-poetic life, he was an optometrist, occasional adviser to FDR, and an official in the U.S. Housing Authority.

Letters Found Near a Suicide (selections from which – or rather ‘letters’ from it – are included in Black Poets) is, I gather, his most famous poem. And it’s very good. But all of his stuff was good, and more startling for being so completely unknown to me. The forms are a little old fashioned, but the way that they are used to convey and deeply political message is very well done.