188 years after its publication, Jane Austen’s Persuasion still generates a buzz. As just noted, Anthony Lane gave the novel a call out in his recent profile of Patrick Leigh Fermor in The New Yorker; meanwhile, “library bosses have scattered 100 copies of [Persuasion] in public places across Hampshire. Whoever finds the novels are asked to read them and then place it somewhere else in the county for others to enjoy.”

Despite it technically being classed as littering, Peter Gibson, [a] Keep Britain Tidy spokesman, backed the idea. He said: “The only worry would be if a book was in a bad state and the pages were strewn across the street, so people would have to be careful about where they left it and what condition it was in. But we do not want to be killjoys on this.”