Bookcrossing.com: a form of literary hide-and-seek
I鈥檝e been geocaching with my boy, using a GPS to find hidden objects whose coordinates are logged on a central website. The game is a double pleasure 鈥� people love creating caches, and people love finding the ones others have hidden 鈥� and it kept reminding me of a form of literary hide-and-seek I used to enjoy, .
Bookcrossing involves 鈥渞eleasing鈥� books into the community, each marked with an individual I.D. number, and waiting for them to be found. Ideally, whoever finds a book goes to the free Bookcrossing website, notes where the book was found鈥� and then reads it and drops it off at some other spot, noting where it鈥檚 been left, and continuing the cycle. Think of it as the book version of the traveling gnome from the movie Amelie, or the dollar bills of the 鈥淲here鈥檚 George?鈥� website.
Bookcrossing has been around since 2001, and now boasts nearly 6 million registered volumes. I first wrote about it in 2003, and talked then to one woman whose book (a copy of 鈥淢essage In A Bottle鈥� by Nicholas Sparks) had traveled the world, from Washington state to Seoul to Tokyo. I just looked up the same volume, one out of nearly 1,000 copies of that book registered on
Bookcrossing, and was sad to see that the Tokyo stop I mentioned six years ago听 was the spot where its public trail ended. If anyone has picked it up since, they haven鈥檛 bothered to share the data.
That鈥檚 what ultimately frustrated me when I first played around with Bookcrossing. I had set out what seemed like enticing books in promising locations 鈥� one of my favorites, Mark Helprin鈥檚 鈥淲inter鈥檚 Tale,鈥� in a hospital waiting room, a copy of Murray Morgan鈥檚 classic Seattle history 鈥淪kid Road鈥� at the city鈥檚 famed Pike Place Market, and so on 鈥� but it was rare to tally even one follow-up note. It鈥檚 not unknown for a Bookcrossing title to resurface months or years after its last log entry, but I鈥檝e been waiting a long time.
This weekend, though, the fun of geocaching nudged me into the game again. I left a copy of the 2009 Zagat Seattle restaurant guide at a natural foods store, and I鈥檝e prepared other books to drop off around the region. Want to watch their progress, if there is any? My books are registered at . And if you want to find 鈥渢raveling鈥� books in your own town, search the site to find out where to look 鈥� or even to register your own, and enjoy the fun of the hiding as much as the seek.
Rebekah Denn writes at .
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