Barry Rosenberg

FIRST, a shout-out to those who responded to my plea on these pages for a fridge, working or not, to be used as a free book exchange in Ōhope.

However, a most unexpected circumstance – some might call it a miracle from beyond – has postponed my immediate need for such.

What I did was grab hold of an empty Styrofoam box outside a sushi shop, load it up with books and place it kerbside along with a FREE sign, hoping for my lower back’s sake the container would be lightened by day’s end.

Following the late afternoon rush-home hour when I went to drag it inside … not a book remained.

Half a dozen subsequent box-loads during the week produced the very same results, a total at this writing of more than 100 published/bound works having disappeared from in front of my home. How to explain this phenomenon?

A sudden plague in our midst of tables each with a shortened leg and a book slipped underneath created the perfect girth for stabilisation?

Maybe, just maybe, people are beginning to forsake their addiction for glued-to-the-palm digital gizmos and are sensibly returning to reading volumes printed on paper. (You hear that, Whakatāne District Council library, which seems to drool over the concept of electronic reading despite so many of us members being older, and thus quite content holding a hard-bound paper tome?)

I’ve read (online, I must sheepishly admit) that bookshops, once dead as ghost towns in Western horse operas and replaced by Korean-run dollar stores and Vietnamese toenail trimmers, are slowly coming back into being around the globe.

What this recirculation of paper means to me, aside from a few hours’ cleansing of shelves that literally haven’t seen a wet sponge for decades, is a tiny beam of hope for the human race.

I shall continue to place free books on the grassy verge just off the footpath, if for no other reason than seriously thinning out my still-burgeoning mass, before establishing a fridge-held exchange.

But the ready acceptance by the public of books made of paper has me wondering: what’s next – a popular return to newspapers, perhaps?