Books About Town

Today a friend invited me to go into London for a 'Mystery Outing'. He only told me it was something to do with books and that I could bring Dolly. Since I am known for my love of books, he knew this would be something I would love to do. I was intrigued because if I could bring Dolly, we obviously weren't going indoors to a museum, bookstore or library.

We ended up parking near the British Museum in the Bloomsbury area. I still didn't know what we were going to do. He said we needed to walk through a park to get to where we were going. As we walked through I said: "Oh, look at that bench! It looks like a book!" "Oh, so it does", he replied. Then suddenly I got it - "Is this what you brought me to see?" And he smiled! :-)

So this was the 'Books About Town' display - 51 of these Bookbenches, painted to depict various works of British literature. They were on display all over London during the summer. My friend only found out about them yesterday and since this was the second to last day of their display, he knew we had to go right away. We only had the late afternoon and evening and so he had chosen the 'Bloomsbury Trail'. We saw 8 of these benches. This one was my favourite. I thought it was Peter Pan at first, but it's actually from J.M Barrie's 1902 novel for adults - 'The Little White Bird' - where the character of Peter Pan is first introduced. The novel Peter Pan had it's own bench.

There will be an auction of all of these benches on October 7th, raising money for the National Literacy Trust, a charity dedicated to raising the literacy levels of disadvantaged children and young people across the UK.

The other benches we saw were:
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
James Bond – Ian Fleming
The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
1984 – George Orwell
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

You can see a list of all the bookbenches here