“Excuse me. Do you know who killed the chauffeur?” – You got to love it when people hosting ‘book giveaways’ get all creative and make others really work for the prizes, and it probably doesn’t come much more creative than The Reader, and their competition to give away a special set of Raymond Chandler hardbacks, which Hamish Hamilton are re-issuing in their original first-edition covers next week (the Penguin blog has posted a nice article on the design process for this latest collection).
Instead of a typical ‘leave your name in the comments’ type of competition, The Reader sent out a ‘Secret Service’ operative to Lime Street train station earlier today (complete with white carnation and a copy of the Liverpool Daily Post 
)), with the express instructions of handing over the bookish swag to the first person who uttered the rather obscure ‘pass phrase’ which titles this Book Bite (as advertised by The Reader a couple of days ago). The winner? One very happy pink-haired lady called Wendi, who from her description sounds like she really is in the spy game – a smiling assassin for the KGB perhaps? ). Joking aside aside though, a fantastically creative idea, and one that should be applauded. Congratulations to The Reader for coming up with such a great idea, and even bigger congratulations to Wendi for playing the spy game perfectly, and bagging those books.
A literary format that you really can take everywhere with you – if you love ebooks because of their portability then, pain pending, you’re really going to really love the portable solutions highlighted by the website Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos. Here people literally take the concept of bookish portability on board, and tattoo various body parts with quotes from books and verses from poems. Nice, if you’re into that sort of thing! ::Credit to Richard at Abe’s Reading Copy Blog.
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