We love Corduroy!

This week, the Library has received a copy of “Corduroy Mansions” by Alexander McCall Smith. You may remember that we wrote about this book late last year, because McCall Smith was publishing this book in daily bites on the Telegraph UK website. People could read all of the chapters to date, or listen to Andrew Sachs, best known as Manuel in Fawlty Towers , reading the latest chapter. Readers could also make plot suggestions to McCall Smith, and he responded to these suggestions on the website. One of the people who posted a plot suggestion called this online novel ”Dickens for the digital age”.

“Corduroy Mansions” was published in this manner in 100 instalments, over 20 weeks from September 2008 to February 2009, and now the hard back copy of the book has been published. I’ve been reading it over the weekend, and have thoroughly enjoyed it so far. It has all the delightful whimsy and wry observation that people enjoy so much in McCall Smith’s writing. My favourite bit so far is the airport sniffer dog, Freddie, who is retrenched in an affirmative action move when they discover that all of the sniffer dogs are male! The collaborative method of writing this book seems to have been a successful experiment.

McCall Smith posted an online letter to his many readers when the series finished. He said
“We are now coming to the end of this novel. This is a sad moment for me, as I have enjoyed the writing of this greatly. And I have also very much enjoyed the comments that you have made – you will see, I hope, that I have taken many of them to heart and tried to embody them in the plot as I developed it. Thank you so much for your support and suggestions.”

Telegraph Media won a media award for this project. The judges called it a “cross-media literary first. " The serial attracted 90,000 readers a week!

We hope you are enjoying whatever you are reading this week.