Finding Jane
Alert Janeite Maureen wrote to tell us that the Hampshire County Council is “releasing” copies of Persuasion in public areas across Hampshire as part of a promotion of their library system.
Whoever finds the novels are asked to read them and then place it somewhere else in the county for others to enjoy.
Hampshire County Council is behind the craze known as ‘book crossing’, and said it was aimed at encouraging people to read more.
Richard Ward, the head of libraries, said: ‘This is a simple, but brilliant idea and hopefully will get people reading and encourage people into our libraries.
‘The books can go absolutely anywhere. They could end up on a train to Darlington, but they could be passed around, so as many people as possible read them.
‘If it proves successful then we could consider doing it again, maybe with a completely different style of book.’
The books have been donated by Penguin as part of the company’s 60th anniversary.
Bosses at Hampshire County Council chose Jane Austen’s Persuasion – of which they have 500 copies in their libraries – because she was born in the county in 1775.
Those who come across a copy are asked to log on to the book crossing website.
Then, using the unique identification number on the label inside the book, they can register their comments about the book and say where they found it.
The idea is part of the Huge Hampshire Read campaign, which encourages people to take out more books and runs until July 15.
Incidentally, we are aware of at least one JASNA region that is releasing copies of Jane Austen novels registered with Bookcrossing.com.
Despite it technically being classed as littering, Peter Gibson, of Keep Britain Tidy spokesman, backed the idea.
He said: ‘The only worry would be if a book was in a bad state and the pages were strewn across the street, so people would have to be careful about where they left it and what condition it was in.
‘But we do not want to be killjoys on this.’
Now that is what we call a wise public official!
Maureen also blogged about this effort at Bookglutton.
June 2nd, 2006 at 10:40 pm
I belong to bookcrossing.com - it’s fun and rather exciting to release books into the wild and see where they travel. My boyfriend however does refer to it snidely as littering.