July 15, 2015

Aziz Ansari’s airport treasure hunt

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Aziz Ansari hid a signed copy of his new book somewhere at JFK International Airport. © ssguy / via Shutterstock

Aziz Ansari left a signed copy of his new book somewhere at JFK International Airport.
© ssguy / via Shutterstock

We here at Melville House love a good literary treasure hunt, like the #FreeBookFriday we launched to celebrate The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato. While there isn’t concrete evidence that comedian/actor Aziz Ansari heard about this and was inspired to do something similar, there’s also no evidence that he didn’t.

Ansari posted on Twitter on Monday that he had signed a random copy of his new book, Modern Romance, during a flight delay at JFK International Airport:

While not exactly a call to action, the tweet got a big response, getting thousands of retweets and favorites from Ansari’s followers. And though it may be daunting to track down a single book somewhere among the six immense terminals of JFK, the photo does offer a visual clue or two. If you zoom in really close, you can see that the shelf talker accompanying the books lists the website HudsonBooksellers.com. A quick glance at the Hudson Booksellers website shows that there’s only one dedicated bookstore on the premises at JFK, so if you were lucky enough to figure that out AND have a flight leaving from Terminal 7, you might have been lucky enough to stumble across the book that Ansari signed (unless it was actually at one of the many Hudson News locations scattered around the airport).

You won’t have any luck if you go looking now, though, as this particular treasure has already been unearthed. On Tuesday morning, Ansari posted another photo to Twitter, showing one of his fans proudly holding the signed copy of Modern Romance:

 

Nick Davies is a publicist at Melville House.

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