I have a dirty little secret: I found lust, intrigue, and wantonness in the unlikely boudoir that is Hart House Reading Room. And Vice, thy name is BookCrossing.com.
Okay, it may not seem so steamy at first glance. BookCrossing is, in essence, a global book-sharing community. But this international library/book club is fuelled by the wonders of the Internet and the human propensity for infidelity-or, depending on what people may tell you-the philosophy of, “if you love something, set it free.”
It seems to me that there is definitely a divide: the camp who views BookCrossing as a light-hearted experiment in karma; and those who see it as thrilling literary promiscuity. Personally, I can’t help but feel a little bit slutty and dangerous discarding a book on the subway, a rush shocking through me as I walk away from the torrid affair I’ve had with its pages. But whichever way you look at it, the program started by Ron Hornbaker in 2001 has excited and engaged book lovers all over the world.
Inspired by mass-tracking websites such as wheresgeorge.com, Hornbaker let loose his bookish Bacchanalia. The idea is simple-after your liason with a certain literary exploit has ended, you label your ex with a BookCrossing ID number registered on the website, and dump it high and dry in any public place at all. Theoretically, your book will be found by another lover of lit who will read it, and using the BookCrossing ID, make an entry on the website so you can both engage in a dialogue regarding your old flame while also tracking its geographical journey at the same time. This person will again release the book into the wilds of civilization, and so continues the legacy of your book and the community of BookCrossing.
There are, however, certain “red light districts” for BookCrossing where your likelihood of hooking up with the program significantly increases. Conveniently, such a hotbed of book-lust is right here on campus at Hart House. When its library became inundated with BookCrossing releases and anonymous donations starting around two years back, it suffered a glut of leftovers.
“It’s a very small space, so we have to be cautious about what we add,” says Library Coordinator Emefa Sewordor, and chuckles: “When books don’t fit in, we don’t burn them! So we figured we’d set up a BookCrossing station.”
Currently the collection ranges from pulp fiction to poetry, romance to self-help. Notable inclusions: a Dinah Washington biography, How to Play Canasta, and a smattering of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery magazines.
In its purest form, a BookCrossing release can occur anywhere at any time (though for outdoor drops, preferably in a plastic bag during the current cold and wet Toronto winter). And there is always the option of a themed release, for example leaving a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul at a Swiss Chalet, or making a drop on an author’s birth or death date. But if you’re a more conservative lit-luster, the BookCrossing area in Hart House is in the main Reading Room on the first floor, across from the porter’s desk.
“Hart House is the student centre at U of T. You probably get more students passing through here than any other location, except maybe Robarts,” says Sewordor. And the heavy literary atmosphere at Hart House provided not only by its patrons but also its Literary and Library committees makes it a obvious and convenient location-fast and easy, just like the program.
Thousands of curious readers have succumbed to the allure of BookCrossing all over the world. Pat Bateman, another coordinator at the Hart House library, has even been contacted by a Brazilian BookCrosser who had perused the Hart House collection online and wanted to arrange a book exchange. But presently at Hart House, Bateman and Sewordor themselves seem to sadly be the only active contributors.
Though Bateman has registered over 200 books herself, it seems that “every time we throw a new batch into the collection, by the next weekend everything’s gone,” Sewordor notes. Apparently U of T’s BookCrossing has been plagued with the seedy underbelly of the BookCrossing community-the selfish book-lusters: always hungry for the hunt, leaving the shelf practically barren.
So if the intrigue of BookCrossing has sparked interest, maybe the next lit-lover bringing some action to the shelf will be you. And if the idea of loving and leaving one of your books isn’t enough to seduce you, the website encourages readers to “-think about this: you may get an e-mail notification five years from now, letting you knowsomeone has made a journal entry on one of your books. And that someone might be halfway across the world. Imagine how excited you’ll be that day, and how much you’ll wish you had seeded the world with even more books over that five-year period.”
The program also appeals to those of us with a small nation of paperbacks crowding our homes. As fellow bibliophile Natasha Durham explains, with BookCrossing, “if things seem too cluttered, you can have your shelf space and eat it too.” In other words, you can be a free and swinging reader while still keeping your Little Black Book in your back pocket.
The main tenets of BookCrossing can be remembered as the 3 R’s-Read a book, Register it at BookCrossing.com, and Release it into the world. “Our main desire right now is for people to know that it exists here at Hart House and to know that it’s ‘give and take’,” says Sewordor.
For all the nitty-gritty on how to join the community of lit-lusters, visit BookCrossing.com, or inquire with Emefa or Pat at the Hart House Library.
