Abstract: By the Giroux correspondence, contact structures on a closed manifold can be understood in terms of open book decompositions that support them. A “spinal” open book is a more general notion that also supports contact structures, and arises naturally e.g. on the boundary of a Lefschetz fibration whose fibers and base are both oriented surfaces with boundary. One can learn much about symplectic fillings by studying spinal open books: for instance, using holomorphic curve methods, we can classify the symplectic fillings of S^1-invariant contact structures on any circle bundle over a surface (joint work with Sam Lisi and Jeremy Van Horn-Morris). One can also use them to compute an invariant that lives in Symplectic Field Theory and measures the “degree of tightness” of a contact manifold (joint work with Janko Latschev). v