I was interested to read in my weekend newspaper that when Michael Gove, secretary of state for education in the UK’s current coalition government, decreed that every school in the land must have a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible, the copies were inscribed ‘Presented by the Secretary of State for Education’. Scouring the web, I find that in fact these words were not just ‘inscribed’ in the books, they were actually tooled onto the bindings.

Does this kind of thing go on everywhere, or just here? I’d be very interested to learn whether followers of this blog know of other acts of large-scale book-giving by authorities around the world, especially if they have pictures of the curious books that result.