My Weekly Book

Because the original purpose of this journal was to write about Bookcrossing, before it got hijacked as a reading diary, I feel it would be nice to actually do a little bit on that subject. Especially since this morning I received an email notification telling me about the following journal entry:

http://bookcrossing.com/journal/1604564

This is for a copy of Max Barry’s dark-future satire Jennifer Government that I picked up for about a pound or so in a charity shop back in April 2004. Reading back in the journal entry, I discover that I took it up to Norfolk with me at the beginning of May and released it at the Official Bookcrossing Zone in a shop called Julian Graves in the Royal Arcade. We’d picked up a couple of absolutely smashing reads there and I felt I ought to Put Something Back, hence the special purchase.

It was nearly a year before anything happened which a) confirms my theory that some people use Bookcrossing zones as unofficial lending libraries and b) shows that it’s unwise to give up too quickly with this game. After that a Norwich-based reader called Ermintrude 75 (visit their bookshelf here) set up a ring that saw it sent to Brooklyn, New York, then back to London, then off to western Australia.

It spent several months with reader Gypsyrose02 before being sent, at the end of July, to a reader in New Hampshire, USA. My notification this morning was to let me know about a new journal entry saying it had arrived. So it’s now in the hands of its sixth Bookcrosser and we can only speculate about where it might end up next.

This is not the common Bookcrossing experience. Unfortunately, releasing a book still largely means never hearing about it again. But it just goes to show what can happen with Bookcrossing at its best – well worth a pound of anybody’s money, I say…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 10:05 am and is filed under Archive - Bookcrossing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.