John Hegley, with his bassist Keith Moore, opening the proceedings for the BookCrossing day on the South Bank
BookCrossing works well in theory. You register a book on the website, write a code in the cover, then leave it somewhere busy and public (a hotel, a bus station, Tracey Emin's tent). Then somebody finds it, types in the code, reads it and leaves it somewhere else. It's like the globe-trotting garden gnome of fame, except it doesn't send you postcards from the Taj Mahal.
The scheme's been covered in these webpages before as it's been going for several years - in fact, one of my first assignments as a student journalist was to stake out a book left on Brighton seafront to see if anybody found it. After five hours freezing behind a pillbox getting covered in salt I only recorded one flicker of interest: a small dog, who sniffed it, walked 200 yards down the promenade then promptly vomited.
On London's South Bank on Saturday, I had the opposite problem. Despite it being the largest mass release in the UK ever, as part of the London Literature Festival, I couldn't find a single book. Well, apart from in the shed with the chalk sign "BOOKCROSSING SHED", but there were only about 40 in there.
Surely it can't be easy to disappear 960 books on the South Bank? Where were they all? I spent about half an hour fruitlessly searching, looking under benches and stairwells, before I concluded that they had either all been taken or somehow dissolved in the lunchtime rainstorm.
The festival encouraged hunters to leave their own books, too. So I dropped off Christopher Robbins' new book about Kazakhstan on a chair in Southbank Centre Square. Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere - which seems to be loved by many but left me stone cold bored - I put in aforementioned shed, and I left Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album in the vegetarian Bonnington Café, a mile away in Vauxhall. But as of time of posting, nobody's picked any up - not even Jay Rayner.
I do dearly love the idea of BookCrossing, but I've just never managed to get it functioning correctly. It seems the Kazakhstan book will be lucky to make it as far as Kennington, then. Somebody please prove me wrong.
