Ingen Reklam Tack! Nique ta publicite! ... Oh, all right then, I'll have some.

I blame the V+A, or more specifically its small exhibition of Penguin book covers. There they were, all spread out, and I was thinking at first - if the publishers reverted to the old, clean, simple style, sales would go through the roof. I'm pretty cynical about consumers, they/we/I like packaging, and I'm sure at least half of all books bought in the UK are never read (I've a further theory that the likelihood of a book being read increases - counter-intuitively - in inverse proportion to the price paid for it, but let's not get into that just now). Tastes have changed, and we're no longer impressed by the colour printing process. Anything that is the opposite to those gaudy foil-inlay covers is bound to have an appeal.

That wasn't all I was thinking. There was some kind of urge welling up in me which I couldn't properly identify. On leaving the V+A I walked down the tunnel as far as South Ken tube, then by street to a second-hand bookshop near Gloucester Road. And there, I am ashamed to say, I quite lost control. See above. The indistinct grey volume at the top right is Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That'.

I blame my new coat. It has a commodious pocket that can hold both a smaller format paperback and a notebook to scribble in. This seems very important for the winter. They say it will be a very cold one this year. Quite right too, I say.

A few months ago I saw a poster affixed to one of those anonymous pieces of street furniture with sticky tape, advertising Allen Ginsberg. Its location seemed odd, on a not terribly busy corner close to the alphabetically and geographically adjacent Swedish and Swiss embassies. The western reaches of Marylebone are hardly Camden. It was gone very shortly afterwards, presumably ripped down by one of the predatory fly-posting firms to make way for an A2 sheet for the next Coldplay/Charlotte Church/etc CD. Then this afternoon I saw similar on the Hyde Park railings - note the homespun cardboard and string, quite unlike most current advertising material, whether licensed by authorities and landowners or not. It was not quite opposite the Dutch embassy. Perhaps that's the common thread. God knows international diplomacy could only improve from a close study of beat poetry by its purveyors.

See inset - who is Julie Boyer? Googling gets me nowhere on this. Perhaps she is the distributor of these posters.