In the Beginning was the Word

Books. We can’t get enough of them.

In fact, we’re a tad like the Imelda Marcos of the bookworld. We’ve got bookshelves in virtually every room in our house.

On a recent trip to Northumberland, we fell in love with Barter Books. This is one of the biggest second-hand bookshops in Europe. Built in an old train station, it’s somewhere we’d be happy to wait all day for a delayed train.



So we’ve huge time for authors who put their lives on the line with their writing. They deserve every reward they can get.

Tricky to find our thinking challenged, then, by other points of view. The UK Pirate Party has been in the news with its campaign for file sharing.

And now we’ve been wooed by website Bookcrossing. A movement dedicated to releasing captive books into the wild for the enjoyment of all.

It goes like this. Do you remember Amelie?

One of our fave films, it tells the story of a young Parisien woman with a bent for spying on her neighbours. When she discovers a small box filled with treasures in her apartment wall, she resolves to return it to its original owner. After this, she begins spreading joy to others. She tells a blind man about the things around him as he shuffles across a street; sets up two frustrated loners in a cafe; and finds a mischievous way to encourage her widowed father to travel.

It’s a film about generosity. Which chimes with Bookcrossing, a movement that defines itself like this:

"n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise”.



You leave a marked book somewhere. Then you log onto the Bookcrossing website to find out how far the book has travelled. Imagine. Nicky leaves her current fave collection of short stories, “The Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri, in a Keswick coffee shop. It gets bagged by someone going on holiday to Iceland. There it gets dropped and embarks on further travels across the US, down to Venezuela, and thereafter to Australia and New Zealand.

It’s the ultimate in recycling.

There’s just one snag. You have to give up your hoarding instinct and get generous instead. Which is tough for us when it comes to books. We love them as much as the bags we make. There’s nothing like the stories, advice and wisdom a book can supply.

I suppose this battle between generosity and our miserliness lies at the heart of many issues to do with sustainability and recycling. How do we beat our inner Imelda and embrace our Mother Theresa instead?

But we are troubled by one other argument.

The cry of the author who says they’re being cheated of a sales fee as their book gets freely passed from hand to hand.

Some are saying organisations like Bookcrossing may benefit readers but are cutting off writers' legs.

So what do you reckon? Should we have intellectual property with rights and fees for writers? Or do we welcome a free market where a book, once published, becomes the property of all?

Our heart’s with Bookcrossing... but we wouldn’t want to be cornered on it by our writer friends.