Today
is World Book Day. I hear that, in 1923, booksellers in Spain wanted to honour
Miguel de Cerventes, author of Don
Quixote, on 23 April, the day of his death, and that is how April 23 came
to be celebrated as World Book Day all over the world. By a happy coincidence,
if I might use the word “happy” in this context, William Shakespeare also died
on 23 April, according to the Julian calendar, which was still in use in
England at the time. In the UK, however, World Book Day is celebrated on the
first Thursday of March.
That April 23 is World Book
Day became part of my knowledge only a couple of years ago when I came across
an article on the subject in a newspaper.
Having gained this piece of knowledge, I called a librarian friend of
mine and asked him, ‘Do you know when World Book Day is celebrated?’ ‘Who celebrates it?’ he asked in reply.
On reflection, that seemed the right answer to the
question. In a world where reading is
fast disappearing, how does it matter when World Book Day is celebrated? ‘My only books,’ said Thomas Moore in the
nineteenth century, ‘were women's looks, and folly's all they've taught
me.’ A modern Moore may mourn: ‘My only
books are the box's looks, and
folly's all they've taught me.’
To be fair, however, there are readers and
readers. For some, reading is a
pleasure. I know a number of die-hard
book-lovers who have grown up on grandmother's tales, on adventure stories, and
on such all-time favourites as Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and P G
Wodehouse – and, of course, on the unavoidable (and inevitable!) Shakespeare
and Shaw. They can read Macaulay and
Gibbon with as much interest and excitement as they can R L Stevenson and P G
Wodehouse. They wouldn't wax eloquent on
their reading like Francis Bacon (‘Reading maketh a full man’); they read for
the simple reason that it gives them pleasure.
For some, reading is a kind of penance. It is because they read books either in the
hope of gaining some knowledge or for practical purposes, such as writing an
examination. I know a person who looks
at every new book with suspicion and wonders if it is good value for money and
time.
There is a third group that consists of people who
love books, who want to be able to say that they have read all the books worth
reading, but who never manage to read any books. Typical of the "reading" style of
this group is what a fellow teacher living in Chennai does: she goes to the
British Council Library and borrows five attractive-looking books which have
just entered the library, keeps them for a fortnight and then returns them
unread.
Readers, pseudo-readers, and non-readers – well, it
takes all sorts to make a world.
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