There is a bookcase at Hillmorton Locks.
Not a little box with half a dozen abandoned paperbacks in it. A proper, sizeable bookcase, packed with books and brought out beside the locks for passing boaters.
I caught Kevin red handed putting it together one day and persuaded him to tell me how it came to be.
It turns out nobody particularly planned it.
For years, donated books at Hillmorton were put out in boxes on a table. People left some, took some and life carried on quite happily.
Then one day somebody delivered another cardboard box full of books and left it on a ledge.
Kevin, one of the Canal & River Trust volunteers at Hillmorton, turned the box onto its side so that the spines of the books faced outwards.
And there it was.
A bookshelf.
Or, more accurately, the beginning of one.
Kevin has been volunteering at Hillmorton for more than thirteen years and is clearly somebody who finds it difficult to leave a potentially useful idea alone.
He made a prototype to see whether a more permanent bookcase would fit the space, then built another section.
The upper part presented a problem. Once filled with books it was simply going to be too heavy to lift into position.
Someone suggested cutting it in half.
There followed a brief misunderstanding about exactly which direction one might sensibly cut a bookcase in half, before the obvious solution presented itself. The top is now made in two manageable sections.
Much of the bookcase itself has been made from things that were never intended to become a bookcase at all.
Kevin and the other volunteers have collected timber and offcuts from recycling areas and nearby workshops. An upholsterer who once worked locally provided useful scraps too.
It is less a piece of furniture than a gradual accumulation of useful bits which have somehow ended up becoming one.
Which seems entirely appropriate for a canal-side book swap.
There aren’t many rules.
You don’t have to arrive carrying a book in order to take one. Nobody records what has gone where, and nobody is going to pursue you along the Oxford Canal because you have failed to return a paperback.
In fact, Kevin says they receive far more books than people take away, so seeing them disappear is positively encouraged.
Bring another one back next week.
Or next year.
Or don’t.
At one point there was an experiment involving stickers, with the idea that books could be tracked as they travelled around the waterways.
It didn’t quite work.
Although rather wonderfully, some books subsequently reappeared at Hillmorton years later.
Homing books.
The bookcase itself is still evolving.
Kevin has plans for a sloping cover over the front and possibly a roller blind, because there is one obvious disadvantage to putting several hundred books beside an English canal.
Rain.
For now, the whole thing appears when circumstances allow. Between roughly April and October, if the volunteer lock keepers are around, the bookcase comes out too.
Nobody set out to create a visitor attraction. There wasn’t a committee deciding that Hillmorton required a community book exchange.
There was a cardboard box.
Somebody turned it sideways.
Somebody else had some spare timber.
And eventually, there was a bookcase.
Boaters can stop, rummage through the shelves and carry a book away with them to somewhere entirely different.
Which means that alongside the boats travelling through Hillmorton Locks, there is another, quieter traffic.
Books.
I like that.
