Here at Books we pride ourselves, of course, on being at the cutting edge of literature, grammar, usage, all that swell word stuff. (And no, I haven't tested myself on The Times Spelling Bee, but I will, I promise. Really. Yes.)

So it is with great delight that we learn from one of our readers that the word “book” has taken on a cool new meaning - I use the adjective advisedly. Jeffrey Stark from London writes: “A colleague recently noticed that her teenage son and his friends were using the word ‘book' as a term of approval, as in ‘that T-shirt is really book'. She wondered why. It transpires that if you text the word ‘cool', predictive texting turns it into ‘book'. Being lazy teenagers they would rather change the meaning of the word than hit the options button.”

Well - here's to laziness, I say, at least in this instance. Over and over again the doom merchants tell us that the printed word has had it, and we'll all be tying up our virtual love letters with virtual pink ribbon; well, no, we won't be writing love letters at all, we'll just be txting. But think of it - the memory, at least, of the book will survive because it will at last come to exist only as a superlative.

Such a survival calls to mind one of my favourite novels - Russell Hoban's magnificent Riddley Walker, first published nearly 30 years ago. The novel is set in a future England (Kent, specifically) devasted many centuries before by a nuclear war; Riddley, the novel's narrator, tells his story in an evolved dialect that is, perhaps, where the language might have got to by then, whenever exactly then is. “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time

befor him ...” A chilling and exuberant book, it's a tribute - as is the little txt mutation of cool/book - to the power of language and the power of human survival: the two are inextricably linked.

But if more evidence is required that book and cool are synonyms, we hear news that this year's Times Cheltenham Literature Festival saw ticket sales top 100,000 for the first time - an increase of 15 per cent over last year. If you haven't yet had a chance to join the fun, note that next year's festival will be the 60th, and so there are bound to extra-special celebrations and events laid on for us all. Read Riddley Walker - and then clear your calendar for next October!

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