The BookCrossing Society

With kids these days becoming ever more likely to throw hardbacks at the local library than neatly check out a book, it seems something needs to be done. I believe I have the solution: we create a bookiety (the book society).

We must use subterfuge and cunning in order to bring the book back. Soon no Metro, iPhone or coffee will grace the hands of a commuter but only War and Peace. And if we combine our bookiety with BookCrossing, the resulting BookCrossiety's sure to work. Here is the plan:

• Stage 1: Any newspaper, phone, iPod, or video game left unobserved is to be swapped with a wild book.
  
• Stage 2: When someone buys any boxed item, such as a DVD, they should find inside the case an 800 page book instead.
  
• Stage 3: Google is to be redirected to the bookcrossing.com every time.
  
• Stage 4: Elevators should be stacked with books. Whenever boarded, it will mysteriously break down for several days. Toilets also heavily supplied with reading material, may also be found to become inexplicably padlocked shut.
  
• Stage 5: Books will eventually become the new currency. A paragraph is equal to a cent, a chapter a dollar, a book 50 dollars. You must simply go up to the check out and proceed to read you book – large type not allowed.

But how, oh how, will we entice the most troublesome of our bookiety to read? Children, the infamously mischievous, are also famously gullible, here are the 10 keys lies to swap Barbie for book:

1. If you read a book enough, it will feel so loved it will fly away, and have a family of sequels.
   
2. If you skip out parts of a book, the characters in the book begin to disappear.
   
3. The world spins round on force of people reading. This means if everyone stopped reading at once the whole universe would implode. Just to make sure, you should really read 5 hours a day.
   
4. If you read the same book in another language, the characters always do slightly different things. You should read as many books in a different language as you can to catch them out. For example, in the Russian Harry Potter, they actually use hairbrushes, not wands.
   vI have hidden the location of your birthday presents in one of these two hundred books. If you begin on this side you should have found them by Christmas.
   
5. Little children who read enough receive a personal visit from Santa at Christmas.
   
6. There have been so many books written that every story has already been told. Therefore if you read one book a week I will guarantee you will find your detailed life story by the time you are 18.
   
7. Bookcases are actually sleeping monsters. If you do not wedge books between their shelve mouths, they will come alive and eat you.
   
8. If you read this book, I will let you read an eBook.
   
9. When you have caught every book crossing book that has been released into the wild and has yet to be found, then you can watch TV for a week.

If this simply plan is executed we will have a BookCrossiety in approximately a year.

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This essay is the November winner for the BookCrossing Classroom Corner, a new semi-regular feature of our semi-regular Newsletter. For details how to enter the contest, please click here.

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