HERE’S A GAME I LIKE TO PLAY. I AM on the bus, or the Tube, and the person next to me is reading a book. I glance over their shoulder — very subtly, you understand, no neck-craning allowed. I want to see if I can pick up a word, a a name, a chapter heading, that might allow the minor victory of: Ah! One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yes, it’s cheating to try to catch a glimpse of the cover.

The danger is that you (bookless) do end up craning you neck and trying to follow along, because what you want is to read the book. So you’ll be lucky if you come across a volume left by a member of BookCrossing.com, the now nearly five-year-old brainchild of a software developer in the American Midwest. BookCrossing is a lovely idea: the releasing of books into the wild. You register online (it’s all free), the book you want to release gets a number, you put that into the book and then leave it lying about for someone to find — on a bus, on the beach, on a bridge. If you’re lucky they will decide to play too: read the book, visit the website, make a comment, then send it on its way again. It’s a kind of happy cross between recommending a book to a friend — albeit one you’ve never met — and a random act of kindness.

So for The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, which starts on Friday, we’ve adapted the idea for festivalgoers. We have 56 copies of books by writers appearing at Cheltenham — one for each year of the festival — and each will have a bookplate encouraging people to post their thoughts via the website. On the eve of the festival, the books will be scattered around the town, so for ten days — the festival runs until October 16 — the books can circulate. Where will they end up? Who will read them? What will readers say about them? How many will simply disappear?

We’re calling it Book Swapping — BookCrossing’s actually made it into the Concise OED, so it wouldn’t be fair to nick that. It highlights one of the best aspects of a literary festival — that of inclusiveness, of the recognition that books don’t need to exist in isolation but can be part of a conversation that’s not just about literature, but about life itself.

Which brings me back, I suppose, to my game. Next time I’m on the bus, I suppose I could simply say: “Hey, could I read that when you’re done?”

www.cheltenhamfestivals.org.uk

www.BookCrossing.com

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