Compost Competition Winner

A couple of weeks ago I announced a competition to win a copy of the book Compost by Ken Thompson. Entrants had to identify what was unusual about the following short review of the book:

K. Thompson's book Compost shows you how to turn scraps and plant cuttings into compost. It shows that it's quick and not at all hard to do. It has lots of full colour photos. This book is good for compost virgins and compost-o-phobics.

I didn't count all the entrants but there were quite a few and most of them were wrong, so maybe the puzzle was a bit too hard. Sorry. On the other hand, five people got it right and lots of people seemed to enjoy trying, so maybe it was just hard enough after all.

The answer was that the review was a lipogram, a piece of writing which avoids a certain letter of the alphabet. You didn't have to use the word "lipogram" to be entered into the draw, but you had to spot that the review didn't use the letter E, the most common letter in the English language.

My beautiful 4-year-old goddaughter Rebecca picked the winner out of a (rather small) hat this morning. The winner was Ruth Turner of Edmonton. Congratulations, Ruth. A copy of Compost will be winging its way to you as soon as I can get to the post office.