Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, author of Oryx and Crake, has gotten sick of all that autographing writers have to do to promote their books. So she’s invented a book-signing machine to do all that personalizing. Apparently, Donald Rumsfeld used a similar device, an automated signature writer, to autograph letters to relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq. Atwood’s device is not quite so devious.

The reader puts their copy of the novel into a book holder, and, at Atwood’s touch of a button, an electronically steered pen reproduces the dedication precisely as originally inscribed.

“Last time I did a tour in Britain it was pretty horrendous,” Atwood said. “This will mean a lot less angst, inconvenience, starvation, sitting in airports, and eating out of minibars.”