Bloggin' Umholtz

Where's Joes' Book?

Several months back I started a free library in our office. Nothing special, just a table in the lunchroom where you could take a book or leave a book. It has been well received and at any given time there are a dozen or so books or magazines waiting to be read.

For last Christmas I created a CD book of my short stories and gave it to my close family members. I think I spoke about it in an earlier post. Well, this week when cleaning my desk, I found a copy of the CD and decided to put it on the table at work. I placed it there on Tuesday. I checked today and it’s gone. I was quite nervous about putting the CD there. After all, these are my coworkers, a good number of whom have known me for twenty plus years. Still, I was proud of my CD book and what good is writing stories if you don’t let people read them?

So now, somewhere in the office or at home is my CD book, being read by one of my coworkers. What will they think? Will I ever know who took it? Will it come back to the table to be picked up by someone else, or is it gone forever, passed on from one reader to the next? Will it sit in a corner somewhere gathering dust? It's sort of like the Where's George deal with the dollar bill.

A large part of me wants to know. An equally large part of me thinks this is very interesting and feels satisfied that someone picked it up at all.

If you have the opportunity to do something like this, try it. Let me know what happens and how you feel about it.

I’ll keep you posted if anything new develops.