Not quite a book fence

Well, we’re back from our little releasing expedition, and although things didn’t entirely go according to plan, it did turn out pretty well in the end.

The original plan was that Mothercat (no relation :-)) and I were going to create a book fence at St Andrews College, because they have a very long lovely old spikey topped fence (ready made book hooks :-)) that runs alongside quite a busy road, where it would get quite a bit of attention from passing cars and pedestrians.

We arrived at St Andrews, where we were met by lytteltonwitch, and began hanging books from the fence. I’d brought along a couple of bags of books, as had lytteltonwitch, and Mothercat had brought several boxes, so we worked out we probably had about 200 books between us.

We’d managed to hang about half of them when someone came out of the school and told us off 🙁 We did attempt to explain the concept of Bookcrossing, and that the whole point of the exercise was to spread the joy of reading (which surely a school must appreciate!) and that we’d been very careful to hang the books in a way that wouldn’t damage the fence, but he started getting huffy and claiming that there was a council by-law preventing anything being hung from the fence (I suspect it’s more about advertising signs than plastic bags with books in them), and made us remove them all (but not before a couple of passing kids had stopped to look at the books and had taken some home, so it wasn’t a total loss). Anyway, we gave in and bundled all the books back into the boxes, and after a quick consultation over a map decided to head to Hagley Park.

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Hagley Park doesn’t have a cool fence like St Andrews, but it does have a fence with footpaths and bike and running tracks on either side, as well as a major road going past, so we ended up just placing a book at the base of each fence-post. It’s a testament to how large the park is that even though the posts are several metres apart, 200 books (less a few that lytteltonwitch hung from a tree) still only covered a small part of one side of the park!

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The finished line of books looked very impressive, and as we were leaving it was starting to attract some attention from passers-by.

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The books I released:
We Always Wore Sailor Suits by Susanna Agnelli
The Clock Strikes Twelve by Patricia Wentworth
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
Six Plays by Lillian Hellman
The Soul of a Bishop by HG Wells
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Cockney Girl by Gilda O’Neill
Tomorrow, When It’s Summer by Helen Brown
Legacy by Tomáš Carba, Alexandr Koráb and David Borek
Man’s Estate by Andre Malraux
The World’s Most Infamous Murders by Roger Boar and Nigel Blundell
The Empire Strikes Back by Donald F Glut
Scruples by Judith Kantz
Summer at the Lake by Andrew M Greeley
The Scar by Frank Kippax
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abé
The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Tropisms and the Age of Suspicion by Nathalie Sarraute
A History of the English Language by Albert C Baugh and Thomas Cable
Damnable Opinions by Llewelyn Powys
The Murder in the Tower by Jean Plaidy

Normally when I post photos that include other bookcrossers’ cars, I make sure I obscure the number plate in some way. But I have Mothercat’s permission to show you her fabulously appropriate number plate:

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