One of the joys of Port Eliot is stumbling across the quirkier elements of the festival. One of these is to be found in the Round Room of the house and it is the wonderful Library of Unwritten Books. Here you'll find racks containing 500 or so small, cardboard-bound booklets with brightly covered covers and a simple white sticker on the front. Inside each is a 1,000 word outline of a possible book that someone, somewhere would like to write. They are the physical embodiment of the phrase "everyone has a book in them".

The idea was conceived by artists Caroline Jupp and Sam Brown in 2002, inspired by the fictional book repository featured in beat writer Richard Brattigan's The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. Using a small mobile recording unit – a converted shopping trolley – they collect the stories through random encounters in parks and city streets and by visiting institutions such as schools and hospitals. They ask the people they meet to tell them about the book they would like to write if they had the time or the skills. Covering would-be authors from the ages of five to 95, the tales feature a wide-range of subjects that, as Jupp and Brown tactfully put it are "not commonly found on library shelves". These include holiday eating habits, football talent spotters and bush jumping. Characters featured in the tales include a pig that turned into a pound coin and a kidnapped ferret. Everyone who takes part receives a copy of his or her own Unwritten Book to keep. All are archived at the Mass Observation centre in Sussex.

Caroline and Sam have been collecting stories at the festival and I asked them for their favourite here so far. Caroline looked sheepish. "Um, it was from a local woman," she begins. "...she wants to write a musical opera about the history of Carbolic soap…"