#Microblog Monday 355: Book Fairies
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I love this idea so much. Book fairies are people who finish a book and decide to pass it along. “They pop an official book fairy sticker on it, which reads ‘take this book, read it & leave it for the next person to enjoy’, and they might even add a ribbon to dress it up as a gift. When they’ve prepared their gift, they will hide it in public to be found…”
It’s kind of like a free little library, except you have this opportunity to leave a letter to the person who will find the book folded inside the pages. (I guess you could do that in a free little library, too.) To explain why you’re leaving it for them to find, or what you hope they get out of it. I don’t think I’d do this with a book I wanted to get rid of; who wants a gift like that? But I’d leave copies of The Phantom Tollbooth around town and hope it changes another person’s life.
What book would you leave to be found?
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8 comments
I love the idea! What a brilliant one. Similar to the Suspended Coffee one. There are many I would like to leave – but few would be, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Wonder, When Breath Becomes Air, Letter from Peking, The Kite Runner and my list can go on and on.
I did this years ago. There was a book that was floating around my work building that had a sticker about passing it on. The book traveled with me to DC, where I passed it off to a group of children on a school trip. Now I wish I remembered the title (it was about a Leprechaun).
I used to be very active in bookcrossing, (www.bookcrossing.com),and the principle was similar: we could exchange books through the site but we often released them “in the wild”,as we say. But in this case the book has a sticker that identifies it with a code generated from the site, so if the person who found the book wanted to register it on the site you could follow the book trail and what the person thought of it.
I do love this idea. I’d explored bookcrossing and I guess this is the same idea. I couldn’t choose just one book though! I think depending on my mood, or maybe where I was leaving the book (I’m thinking feminist books in the cafe near the local girls’ high school, for example), they’d change from day to day. There are so many wonderful books, of so many different genres. You’re inspiring me to do it with some of my books that I loved but will probably not read again.
I like this idea, and although I’m not sure which book(s) I would leave around, I like Mali’s idea of matching book to location. I follow Matt Haig on Instagram, and he’s been leaving autographed copies of “The Midnight Library” around London/England recently. I think that would be so cool to stumble onto something like that!!
What a delightful idea! And I love Mali’s idea of matching book to location…
The Magic of Believing – It was written in the 1940’s but has some timeless concepts that fit right in with mind / body stuff people are currently gravitating towards. It was written in some part at that time to help people coming out of World War II and would be especially relevant post-pandemic. I think it would be a very appropriate book to just come upon in some unlikely spot.
This idea makes me feel subversive…
Not gonna buy any anarchist cookbooks… (especially since my governor and state legislature are heavily invested in making it easier to kill school kids in ways that are even more lethal than pipe-bombs…) But maybe copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves or just plain information on birth control options. Or actual history books about how horribly we’ve treated our minority populations. Like March or They Called Us Enemy.