How to feed the paper ghosts

Anyone can feed the paper ghosts. Basically it’s just putting something interesting into a book that someone else is likely to pick up. So library books are good for this, books that live on your bookshelf at home are not. There are many different things you could make or write to leave in a book. You don’t have to do it this way, although it’s great fun. I make postcards and this is how I do it:

1. Go to a library. Choose a book you know, or choose one to read and read it.

2. Scan/copy/photograph the book cover and print it out, not too large.

3. You can choose another image to use with this. I use pictures from current magazines or newspapers usually. Try to get something that relates to the book or comments on it, maybe something that shows what you think about it or something that you think shows the most important theme or idea.

4. Get some little scissors, pritt stick and a blank postcard and get cutting and glueing. You can cut things up and mix them about as much as you like.

5. Open the book without looking what page you’re at. Copy the page.

6. Use the words on this page to write a haiku. A haiku has three lines with set numbers of syllables: 5 – 7 -5. It’s good if it makes sense, more or less. Say something relevant to the book and to the picture you’ve made. Relevant doesn’t have to be obvious.

7. Cut out the words from the copy of the page (not the real page!) and stick them on the postcard in order. You can stick some bits on the front and bits on the back if you like. (You can also just write it on if you can’t be bother with this bit.)

8. Write the name of the book and the author somewhere on the back of the postcard.

9. Go back to the library and slip your postcard into a different book.

That’s it. Dead simple. Simpler to do than to describe actually. And you could change it anyway you liked to suit yourself: make the image some other way, write something different, whatever.

This method is based on that of the PictureText project run by Sylvia Borda and Sinead Morrissey.