Last year this festival had been visited more subtly by the anonymous artist, who left fifty paper flowers around Charlotte Square gardens for whoever might find them to keep.
This year the paper sculptures are already present in spirit, as the second edition of GiftED is on the shelves (the first edition sold out before Christmas the previous year).
Over the past few weeks the still-anonymous artist had been active on Twitter, encouraging people to share their stories of why books matter to them. And, as it turned out, blogging quite enigmatically. So this time there was less surprise as she had warned the local Twittersphere that the flight was to occur at 1430 on August 17th...
And cue bookshop chaos as thirty-some mysterious blue bags arrive, pulled open to reveal caged birds!
Birds of all shapes and sizes, each with unique tags, some with quotes attached...
any time I happen to open my Front door
A pigeon batters out the bay tree opPosite
and stumbles
into flight as implausibly as a jumbo
MaCKinnon
But these birds were not more gifts to the Book Festival; they were to fly far away. Each was tagged with instructions on where the birds should be re-gifted: "Leave me behind in a cafe you love", "take me a long way from here and set me free in a bookish place", and so on. The public were to take them and spread the love to new places and people.
But there were a few extra special birds. Four of them larger than the rest.
Two - a heron and an egret - were much like the others. The peacock was addressed to the Guardian newspaper - major sponsors of the festival that year and, through their then-beatblogger Michael MacLeod, one of the first places to report on the sculpture - and had a tail made partly of maps. The fourth stood out dramatically as it was painted black; a crow, with shreds of paper addressed:
"@edbookfest
"For Iain (M) Banks who
went the crow road far too soon"
Ian Rankin
As there were so many birds flying away it was impossible to track their destinations. As far as I know, the crow is still at Stirling University, the peacock with the Guardian. The other two large birds made a brief trip to the Dundee Literary Festival...
... and have since starred at various libraries around Edinburgh. The rest are flown away, bringing pleasure to unexpected venues around the country (world?).
The still-anonymous artist maintained the Free to Fly account on Twitter for a while and then one day it vanished. Is that the end of the story?
