Ever had the feeling you're being watched?

Well, if you've chanced upon a best-selling paperback on a bench in Luton recently, it's possible someone had an eye on you.

Over the past 10 weeks, literature fan and father-of-three Mike French, 41, has been surreptitiously conducting an experiment in the town centre with the aid of £150 worth of books.

One has been left each week on a bench outside the library in St George's Square to tempt passers-by, with some intriguing outcomes.

Results have been published on his website, with the time taken for a book to be picked up ranging from 56 seconds up to 90 minutes, and the unsuspecting readers have even been captured on film.

Mike, 41, of Alexandra Avenue, has just launched a magazine version of the website, The View From Here, and carried out the 'fastest book' experiment to show that literature can be fun.

He said: 'We wanted to do the experiment just to see how people reacted. The people who picked them up were quite mixed - it ranged from young to old.

'One guy I saw picked up a book and took it into a pub, but then he came out without it, so I guess he might have traded it in for a beer.'

The quickest book to go was Men in Space by Tom McCarthy, and the slowest was Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes.

To view the results of the experiment, and watch the video, click here.