Catch and release

24 Apr 2010 3 Comments

by madsilence in Books, Japan, Life, Reading, Thoughts, Travel Tags: BookCrossing, BookMooch, Kanazawa visit, Read the printed word

Do you like to share a good book?  Sharing is part of the fun of reading.  I’ve randomly mailed books to friends & family members, even a number to Japan.  I gather books from used book sales & public libraries and donate them to the poor and needy.  I’ve even left books in public places (C’mon, let it go, un-curl those rigid fingers) with the hope that another reader would find it, enjoy it, and pass it on.  I’ve been doing this on & off for years.

I had to travel to Japan to learn about BookCrossing.com.  The concept is simple yet engaging:

BookCrossing is earth-friendly, and gives you a way to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. A book registered on BookCrossing is ready for adventure.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym — anywhere it might find a new reader! What happens next is up to fate, and we never know where our books might travel. Track the book’s journey around the world as it is passed on from person to person.

If only I’d known there were two books running wild within the confines of Tokyo’s Narita airport I could have tracked ‘em down, hog-tied them, read them in captivity, and released them again.  If you love a book, you have to let it go.

A "book forest," where people can leave or find old volume. Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times writes of the popularity of bookstores in Germany:

“Shortly after I moved to Berlin from New York, for example, I noticed there were bookstores all over town. [...]  Berliners looked nonplussed when I asked them to account for all the bookshops. Along with currywurst and nude saunas, bookstores have long been such a banal fact of life here, as they are across Germany, that only an outsider might bother to think their number was remarkable. The proliferation turned out to derive from a very conscious decision after the war to restore civilization in West Germany by supporting a kind of ecosystem of small publishers and small bookstores to which, in certain small towns, trucks that delivered books to the bookstores overnight also delivered drugs to the drugstores: drugs for the body, books for the mind, a metaphor of recovery.”

I like how Kimmelman puts it:  Drugs for the body, books for the mind, a metaphor of recovery

So why do we do it?  How to explain the allure of the printed word?

Charity Guide provides ideas on how to Recirculate Old Books.

BookMooch helps you to Give Books Away. Get books you want.

Related links:

Japanese Mirror (Japanese BookCrossing site)

~MadSilence to&w

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