Free Winnie-the-Pooh books are being put into 150 phone-box libraries around Britain. And a diary found in a skip near Stourbridge in 1965 has finally put a name to the soldier who wrote it.

The red phone box on the village green at Chartham, in Kent, is a public library now. It is one of 150 phone-box libraries around Britain that are being filled with free copies of Winnie-the-Pooh. 1

Farshore, the bear's original publisher, is donating AA Milne's classics along with a new authorised sequel, A Little Boy and His Bear. The campaign is timed to the bear's centenary — Milne's first Winnie-the-Pooh book appeared in 1926, illustrated by EH Shepard, its setting inspired by Ashdown Forest in East Sussex — and aimed at a second British fixture, the red phone box. Milne's stories grew out of the stuffed toys belonging to his own son, Christopher Robin Milne. 1

The actor Sally Phillips, who narrates the newly reissued audiobooks, launched the campaign beside Chartham's box, reading to schoolchildren. "He has always been the number one bear in our house," she told the BBC. The books are "great to read as an adult because they're really funny, much funnier than you remember", she added. 1

Across the country, disused red phone boxes have been adopted by villages, refitted with shelves and left open: take a book, leave one. Chartham's is run by Dr Nicole Holt, who teaches public health at Canterbury Christ Church University. "They are really good for accessibility, they're free and are available to absolutely everybody," she told the BBC. She hoped the campaign would push other people to set one up. 1

The children at the launch also got a storytelling workshop with Jane Riordan, the sequel's author, and an illustration session with its illustrator, Andrew Grey. Riordan said being asked to write a follow-up to Milne's tale was the privilege of her career. 1

Nominations are open for the free books, and the organisers want them from phone-box libraries that already exist, to help them "uncover more hidden gems". Libraries in Derbyshire, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire and the West Midlands have signed up. 1

The campaign lands in the government's National Year of Reading: reading enjoyment rose this year after four years of decline, according to the National Literacy Trust's annual survey. 1

An older story came back this week, too. In 1965 a 12-year-old boy found a diary in a skip at a rubbish tip in Norton, near Stourbridge. It had a bullet hole through it and was covered in blood, and its last entry was dated 10 August 1918. 2

Roughly thirty years later a man carried it into Dudley Museum. Because there was a local angle to it, the museum put the diary on display behind a single red rose. In 1996 it was presented to Colin Reid, the museum's curator, during an exhibition about the First World War. 2

Reid began working through Australian military service records to find out who had written it. "The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn," he said. 2

The diary's author was Claude Nuttall, an Australian who had been wounded in the First World War. While he recovered at Stourbridge Hospital he met a local woman, Violet. They married. Five weeks after the wedding he was sent back to the front. 2

The records Reid found also carried the end of the story. Nuttall was killed in action three days after the last entry in his diary. 2

The research is now a book. The Digger's Diary will be launched at Stourbridge Library on 15 October, as part of Dudley History Festival. 2

Reid's account of why he stayed with it is simple. "I just felt this is actually a personal story… I couldn't help myself," he said. "Right from the very first moment that I held the diary, I had that real sense of connection with it. I was really hooked." 2

"There was a greater poignancy in something that actually has been created or treasured by somebody… something that kind of records a life," he added. 2

What I take from both is the same stubbornness. Somebody decided that a hundred-year-old bear and a blood-stained diary were worth handing on, and then did the work.