Some of you will know about BookCrossing, the website where you can ‘release your books into the wild’ for someone else to enjoy, where it is possible to register your book and track the journey it takes through its unique ID number. Via BookCrossing I gave away three Mary Stewarts on 9 May 2017, as a small act of commemoration (she died on 9 May 2014) and I wrote about it here. I only know the fate of one of those books: Thornyhold was found by someone who registered their find on BookCrossing with these words:

really like Mary Stewart, and this is as good as all her other books, thoroughly enjoyed it.

This makes me happy!

Now, regular readers of this blog may remember that I went to Avignon, Nimes and Marseille a year ago, as a wedding anniversary trip, and on this blog I shared photographs and wrote about where my footsteps retraced those of Charity in Mary Stewart’s Madam, Will You Talk?, beginning with this Avignon post. This year I am going to Poland for my anniversary – no Mary Stewart link there but I am going to leave Mary Stewart’s The Ivy Tree and Rose Cottage (plus Robert Macfarlane’s essay The Gifts of Reading) while I am there, in the hope of creating new Mary Stewart fans. Here are my books, registered on the BookCrossing website:

bookXing

I have made labels to stick inside the books.

bookcrossing

Tomorrow, I will leave these books at three different locations and write ‘release notes’ on the BookCrossing site. I hope that the finder of at least one of these books will register its journey on the website – and hopefully the readers will become lifelong Mary Stewart fans!

Have you given away or found books via BookCrossing? I’d love to know your story. Or have you given away books using The Book Fairies? I have given away books with them too – and wrote about it on my general book blog, The Three Rs Books, see here – and while I like their ethos too (and their fab badges and stickers etc) I think it’s a missed opportunity that they don’t offer an ID number so that a book’s progress can be tracked. That is why I have gone back to BookCrossing this time.

 

 

As always, I’d love to know your thoughts and comments.

 
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