BY JOHN JENSEN
It looks a bit like a bird house, but it’s really for books – a council initiative to encourage reading and acquiring knowledge. The boxes are scattered around the district in parks and squares and the like. You take out a book for free then either return it or replace it when you’ve finished. Recently, I’d edited a fairly large hardback – The Bonanza Book of Bronze Age Artefacts. As an experiment I decided to leave my proof copy as bait. I had to sit it on top of the paperbacks because it was large size and otherwise wouldn’t fit. I kept watch, on and off, day and night – well, evening – for a fortnight. Not one soul borrowed it, let alone looked at it. And then one afternoon just as I was about to take it away, I realised it had gone. I was delighted, until I saw a young man having lunch, sitting with my book on his lap. By using it as a tray for his Wasabi and coffee he had unwittingly turned it into a useful contemporary artefact. I left my Bonanza to its fate.