#47-48

Stoke train station
Train stations are good. Waiting for ages in one, however, is not. I decided to leave my last two in the waiting room in Stoke station, hopefully to be found by someone about to go on a stupendously long train journey. I'd like to think this would make them smile.

And with that, we are done.

#46

Train

Well, this took a lot longer than I hoped. I intended to do some train books last Friday on the way to a house party (cool as ever, Adam!) but ended up being unable to get a train because they were all called off. This one I left in the flip-down table as I left my train back to Stoke from Leamington.

#45

The Dirty Duck
Wow, I've got a bit behind on this haven't I? Only three books left to go, which I had a nice plan for the other day but that got scuppered. I've been having a rethink and am trying to work out a good place to do the last few. This one I left last Wednesday, on a table in the pub. Nice.

#43-44

Luke and Issy

This is my housemate and his girlfriend, who each got a book. They wanted to do some weird Superman pose together for their picture. No, I don't understand either.

#42

U1 bus

You have no idea how hard it is to take an in-focus picture on a moving bus. This is the best picture out of about 10 that I took. I left this on the back seat of the bus, hopefully someone will find it even if it is the driver.

#41

Polly
Sorry there have been no updates for a few days. This week's been mad-busy, and I haven't had much time to do more book-giving. I'll get them all finished soon, I promise. This one's from Monday. Polly should definitely be happier about her free book. Ah well.

#40

Jonno
This is meant to be some kind of facebook/"book-face" joke. He needs to get out more.

#39

Ben

Ben is the person I set up the fan page for Dan with. He's a computer scientist who has never seen Star Wars. What. He has also never read this book, but he will soon.

UPDATE: on Thursday (a.k.a. 3 days after I gave this book to him), Ben came over to me and told me he'd finished the book and that he thought it was "amazing". Result.

#38

Dan
Dan is a man so awesome that a friend and I made a facebook appreciation page about him. I bumped into him on campus and offered him a book in exchange for a picture. He asked whether he should karate kick for the picture. What a guy.

#35-37

Bus stop, Warwick University

I am very well acquainted with this bus stop. It's the one closest to the maths department and thus the one I find myself at each day. It gets used pretty often, so I suspect these will have gone fairly quickly as well. Good stuff.

#34

Bench, outside the Modern Records Centre (I think), Warwick University

Yep, another bench. This time, however, it was pretty nice outside so there's a high chance someone came here and found it.

#31-33

The Koan, outside Warwick Arts Centre

Aside from its awful name, I think this is a pretty cool sculpture-type thing. At night those three curves near the top light-up and it rotates, which is pretty cool. I took a closer picture of the books at the bottom, which doesn't really add anything but let's post it anyway.

Yeah, books. Moments after I took this picture and started to walk away, I heard someone walking quickly down the small set of steps near here, and turned around to see him looking over at the books. He picked one up and took it with him. Success.

#30

Jamie, Rise, Warwick Arts Centre

Rise is a wonderful shop. It sells CDs and DVDs and books and has a vinyl section, but isn't stupidly priced. I spend a silly amount of money in there, so I decided to give whoever was working a copy of the book in a sort of role-reversal. It happened to be Jamie, who seemed slightly surprised but intrigued by me offering him a book. Just what we want.

#27-29

Warwick Arts Centre

Another set of tables. this time, upstairs in the Arts Centre (surprisingly enough, it's just opposite the SU). This is an excellent place to sit, very comfy. You should probably be able to make out the third book in the distance.

#23-26

Student Union, Warwick University
I assure you these are 4 different books, just fairly similar-looking images. These are some tables in the upstairs of the SU. There were a few people around at the time, so I expect these went quite quickly.

#13-22

So, because the event is World Book Night, I thought it might be a good idea to leave some books dotted around town for people to find in the morning. Using resealable food bags to protect the books from the outside world (in what I feel no arrogance in saying was an excellent idea), I hit the streets. However, due to not being used to living near the town centre and downright idiocy, I forgot it was Saturday and thus drunk people would be everywhere. As a result, There aren't really many exciting locations, and nearly all of the photos are pretty dreadful. But, for the sake of being complete, let's post them all anyway.

Various places around Leamington Spa

Wow, they were pretty awful pictures, weren't they? I suppose they're just for illustrative purposes, so it shouldn't matter all that much. Let's go through them one at a time:

• A bench. Exciting!
• Another bench, this time in a small shelter just outside the Citizens' Advice Bureau. I have no idea why this sheltered area exists, but I liked it. It got a book.
• A car windscreen. Herein begins a fairly entertaining exercise in picking cars totally at random and deciding to leave books on the windscreen roughly in front of the steering wheel.
• Nondescript car.
• Another car, but this time a picture I like. It's a nice red. Also, just to the left of where I left the book was a Warwick University Car Park Pass. Yes!
• Big car.
• Painfully dark car.
• Car outside flats where people were singing very loudly
• NOT A CAR! This is actually the doorway to the church near to my house. I felt they might like a free book. The security light, although beneficial to a nice photo, made me feel really suspicious.
• People carrier.

Now, I am aware of the dangers of many of these book placements. There's a chance that they might get damaged by the weather (although I hope the food bags prevent that) or by an unobservant driver, and a chance the person who finds it might not appreciate it or that a drunkard may come across it and move it. But I really like the idea of someone finding something totally unexpected, and I feel that outweighs the risks.

#12

Louise

#9-11

Vending machines, Warwick University Library
These ones are fairly simple, really. I left them in or near the exit slots of some vending machines with a note on saying "Free book". However, it is here that you will begin to notice the severe deterioration of my camera skills when people are nearby. I get panicked, and pictures come out badly. Apologies. What's nice to note is that when I returned to this area an hour later, all three books were gone. Success!

#8

Isiah, Warwick University Library
Upon arriving in the library, I saw my good friend John and spoke to him briefly about the bag of books I was carrying. He said he knew someone around who would like one, so I said he should give them one and get me a picture. This is Isiah, a friend of his. He looks so happy, I love it.

#3-#7

Maths Undergraduate Workroom, Warwick University

The UG workroom in the maths department is probably one of my favourite places on campus. It's a good place to work and the maths department itself is lovely. I figure leaving these here over the weekend might mean someone who has had to go in to work might pick one up and momentarily forget about their degree being hellish (trust me, it is). Moreover, the book itself is about a boy who loves maths and I doubt I'll be the only maths student who can relate to him. This is a stack of 5 books, so 5 different people can enjoy it. Here's another picture to show better roughly where I left this stack (although it's a bad picture because I felt self-conscious of there being other people around the room, sorry)

UPDATE: I returned here today (the day after) and noticed all of the books (plus the note) had gone. Yes!

#2

Mrs Kang
I thought it'd be a nice gesture to give a book to the people who run the corner shop at the end of my road. A lady whose name I discovered is Mrs Kang was working today, but she didn't really want to be photographed. So this one is just her hands and the book inside the shop. Cool!

#1

Me

Yeah, I know this is a bit of a cop-out, but I wanted to keep the first one. Sorry. The rest of them will be better, I promise.

Delivery

So on Thursday I made the very short journey (to be accurate, it was a diversion on my journey home from uni) to Waterstones in Leamington to collect my box of books. Here's some of them. As you can tell, I ripped the inner packaging open like an excited child.

An introduction.

Hello. Not long ago, I applied to be a "giver" for World Book Night. For those of you who don't know, World Book Night is an event wherein 1 million books are going to be given away, for free. A marvelous idea, and one designed to heavily involve the public by asking people to give away 48 copies of a book of their choice from a list of 25 titles (if you want to know any more about this, there's a link to the WBN website at the top of this page). It just so happened that my favourite book of all time, Mark Haddon's wonderful The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, was on the list. I couldn't get the application off fast enough. Maybe I'll do a post soon about why I love the book. But anyway, tonight I received an email saying that I'd been selected to be a "giver" for this book, and I've made this blog to track what happens to the box of books I'll be receiving in about a month. I plan on photographing what I do with each book, and hopefully there will be a few interesting posts along the way. I also want to leave a link to this blog in any book that I hope ends up in the hands of a stranger. Maybe that's why you're reading this, who knows. Regardless of how you got here, I hope you enjoy this blog and I hope you read Curious Incident and grow to love it like I do.