An Irishman's Diary

It's always nice to discover that what you thought of as a personal failing was in fact a virtue ahead of its time.

So it is with the project in which the National Library has left 250 anthologies of W.B. Yeats's poetry on trains, buses, park benches and other public places. The idea is that strangers will pick them up, read them, and pass them on. Enthusiasts call it "book-crossing" and - wouldn't you know? - it's already big in the US.

Little did I realise at the time, but I have been pioneering a similar concept for decades. Not just with books, either. In what I now see was an embryonic "umbrella-crossing" project, I have left an estimated 250 of these objects on trains, buses, and other public places over the years for others to pick up and use.

The difference is I didn't do it deliberately - not on a conscious level, anyway. Also, it never occurred to me to organise a website where the cheapskates who received my property could post reviews ("I found this umbrella good in straightforward rain conditions, but its flimsy plot structure made it incapable of dealing with high winds") and, crucially, tell me how I could get it back.

Still, the fact that I thought of it first does not cloud my admiration for the book-crossing initiative, which in the US has hundreds of thousands of members distributing books and logging their movements.

Not that they merely distribute books. In book-crosser parlance, they "release" them "into the wild" for others to "catch". The language is telling. In retrospect, perhaps it was not entirely an accident when, for example, I left my copy of Crime and Punishment on a 15B bus back in 1987. Dostoevsky had never been fully domesticated while with me, and it was a struggle for us to get as far as page 310 together. Maybe I had to let him go. I just hope his new owner was able to give him a better home.

Not to denigrate park benches or cafés, but there is a particular aptness to leaving books on public transport. Like a train or bus, a good book can take you to a different place - occasionally somewhere you hadn't planned to go. And, like public transport, the consumption of literature is all about making connections.

Most people could represent their lifetime's reading in the form of a city transport map. For the less voracious reader, it might look like Dublin's transport map, with just a few lines: a green one for Irish history, an underground metro for romantic fiction, and so on. But you wouldn't need to be a bookworm for your reading map to look more like the London Underground.

And the great thing about literature is that it really is all about the journey. You never arrive. No matter how much you read, you will not know everything. In this sense, a good book is a bit like a Ryanair flight. It brings you a bit nearer your destination, but you'll always need something else to get you there.

Book-crossing has its denigrators, notably those with a vested interest in sales. Critics include chic-lit queen Jessica Adams, who has complained that it "devalues" books. From a self-styled "astrologer and author", this looks like the pot calling the kettle black. But it's not so easy to dismiss Shakespeare, who condemned book-crossing 400 years in advance.

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be," he has Polonius tell us; "For loan oft loses both itself and friend/ And borrowing dulleth edge in husbandry." Yet Shakespeare too had a conflict of interest, and his advice may also have been motivated by the bottom line. Why, he even hints as much in the next line: "This above all else, to thine own self be true."

I have some sympathy with the critics' view, based on my own vested interest. I'm not opposed, per se, to the informal newspaper-crossing system operated by many cafés, in which the management provides free copies or keeps a pile left behind by other customers. But it seems to me that this system has bred a class of person who thinks nobody buys his own newspaper any more.

It annoys me inordinately when such a freeloader gestures at my sports supplement or review section and asks if he can "take" it. And there is worse than him about. I have sat beside complete strangers in cafés who picked up one of my papers and perused it briefly without saying anything at all, despite the withering looks with which I tried to fix them.

Newspaper-sharing clearly dulleth the edge of such people's husbandry, to put it mildly. And yet I agree with the book-crossers who claim that the practice of lending literature encourages reading among those who otherwise would not. It would be hard to prove any link between the project and a loss of sales. After all, the chances of someone picking up a free copy of a Jessica Adams book while en route to buy it are about as good as those of Jessica Adams featuring in the National Library's next giveaway.

Second-hand bookshops used to be a big threat to sales too, and somehow the industry survived - better than the threat did, in fact. From Kenny's of Galway to Greene's of Dublin, I've been losing favourite second-hand bookshops lately like I used to lose umbrellas.

The way things are going, soon the only place you'll be able to find old books will be the bus.