by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Local book-lovers are increasingly laying their books on wooden park benches, food court melamine tables, street corners and anywhere else that others are likely to stumble over them.

The abandonment of printed literature is part of a fast-growing experiment to alter the fate of used books. The donors are fuelled by the dream that serendipity will put a book into the hands of another, who will be rocked and enlightened by the words within, and perhaps in turn will put it out again to be found by yet another.

Bookcrossing, as the practice is known, has approximately 1,000 local adherents who have registered at the www.bookcrossing.com site. They include Capucine Plourde, a West Island Web developer, who has spent the last few years dropping off paperbacks in hospital waiting rooms and at the unofficial headquarters of the movement, Café Perk on Parc Avenue.

“I come from a family with a lot of books,” she says. “Whenever we moved, there were boxes of books to carry. The idea of throwing out a book was like sacrilege, you just didn’t do it.

“With bookcrossing, you’re not throwing your books out, you’re letting them go. The cool part is that they can travel and move on and show up 1,000 miles away to be read by someone else. I’ve heard of books falling into people’s hands at just the right time. There was a guy at a hospital waiting to see if his wife had cancer and there on the table was a released book about how to deal with cancer. Sometimes the weirdest karmic things happen.”

Those who find the books are encouraged by a note inside it to register the discovery at www.bookcrossing.com, and when one does, it’s celebrated as a “wild catch,” in the terminology of the 432,000 site members, who hail from over 130 countries.

The most prolific Montreal bookcrosser is likely Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue retired accountant Jan La Valley, who has released 857 and had 131 report back. The self-described bookaholic loads up on books at flea markets and church sales and then strategically leaves them out like a baby on a doorstep. “I’m not a voyeur, but there’s some tennis courts behind my apartment and in the summer I can leave a book leaning against the net and see somebody pick it up,” she says. “That’s kind of fun, particularly if it’s a tennis manual.”

Airport releases might attract suspicious security guards, and malls might lead to a quick trip to the garbage bin, but leaving books elsewhere can be a matter of creativity. “One fellow in Australia left a book on the Sydney Harbour Bridge,” says La Valley. “Others put them in waterproof baggies and put them into fountains. I sometimes leave them suspended from tree branches.”

Plourde says the hobby helps return enchantment to modern living. “If you find a book and read a note inside indicating that somebody specifically left it to be found, it adds a little magic touch that people don’t have in their lives these days. It’s like finding a little treasure, like a total stranger has left this for me. And how often do you get a gift from a stranger?”