On Sunday the Museum of Loneliness shot some books, with a Winchester double-barrelled shotgun. An interesting mess: you wouldn’t want that to be the back of your head. There is of course the problem of whose books you shoot. In the 1960s Pan Books produced a paperback edition of James Bond with a facsimile bullet hole in the cover, which was very cool. Even then I wondered what it might be like to shoot a book for real. MoL was also thinking of artist John Latham’s book experiments though, as far as we know, Latham stopped short of shooting his books.The title came first: The Book Executions. After that it became obvious some books would have to be shot, the MoL being a literal rather than conceptual body. MoL has a long list of books it would like to shoot but, leading by example, shot its own. Two first editions of the US hardback of The Psalm Killer. The shot did not penetrate all the way through: big book, good body armour. Two firsts of the British edition of Robinson (paperback) which would save no one’s life: blasted right through, as were the copy of the German translation of The Psalm Killer and a paperback called The Unwanted, found lying in the street last week, in the rain, asking to be put out of its misery. In future MoL will be more CSI, using different types of gun and staggered distances, with forensic notes and tags and little plastic bags. This time we just stood ten metres away and blasted. MoL recommends buying a hardback copy of The Psalm Killer (available on request) to carry about you at all times so in the event of any assassination attempt you will most likely survive, so long as the shooter doesn’t aim for the head. The experiment rendered all the books unreadable (which maybe they were in the first place).