Happy World Book Day
WBD isn’t quite as commercialised as Christmas, but its sponsors – The Publishers’ Association, The Booksellers’ Association and National Book Tokens – definitely want to establish reading and book buying as a habit at an impressionable age. WBD is a celebration of reading for pleasure. Originally designated in 1995 by UNESCO, it is usually celebrated on the 23rd April, following the local custom in Catalonia where roses and books were given to loved ones on St George’s Day. In Britain and Ireland it is usually celebrated in the first week of March and since 1998 has been associated with the donation of free £1 book tokens for children. World Book Day Ltd is a registered charity which encourages schools and libraries to hold events and some of the most innovative events this year are an ‘Extreme Reading’ photo competition being held by a school in Wales where staff and students are hunting for weird and wonderful places to enjoy a book; WBD parades (I wonder just how many will dress up as Harry Potter or the Gruffalo); a competition to design a bookbag; and a ‘Can’t Read Won’t Read’ event to help the struggling reader. All of these events might be relevant topics for the 14th Annual ARPF conference ‘Popular Fictions: Selling Culture’.
WBD is one of a range of initiatives to entice the reluctance reader into the bookshop which have been promoted by the book trade, i.e. reading groups, government strategies such as the ‘Year of Reading’ and literacy charities which enable authors to meet their young readers. The most successful of these has to be The Big Read in 2003. The BBC’s involvement was central for this community outreach programme as it offered high profile television coverage alongside other media platforms, with participation by the general public at external events, such as those still being continued by WBD. The Big Read promoted the message that celebrities and ordinary people were passionate about reading and confident about the pleasures of popular books.
Discussions during that year as the nation debated its favourite books, found that participants regularly commented on disappointing comparisons between childhood and adult reading; they saw adult reading as governed by a literary paradigm that legitimates intellectual pleasure but dismisses the emotional pleasures of childhood experience of books. Research which had informed the government’s 1999 Reading and Literacy Campaign adopted a strategy of jettisoning books and the chore of a book at bedtime in order to motivate parental involvement and support for a far more functional approach to their child’s reading (Broadbent, 2000).
So although WBD focuses on children and very young potential readers, who may enjoy the bounce and rhyme sessions held today at local libraries, the charity is also thinking of the third of people in the UK identified by a 2005 Bookseller survey as never reading books. The research discovered that readers were polarised between being non-readers (34%) and heavy readers who read on average over half an hour a day and bought between 30 to 40 books a year (Dean 2005). So WBD Ltd returns us to the pleasures of reading. The cartoon motifs for the pages of the charity’s website affirm the relationship between reading and consumption, showing a girl eating sweets but not taking her eyes from the comic in her lap. Books are larger than the children who read them, and a boy in a car is surprised by the book he is reading, while one girl reads while flying accompanied by her co-pilot cat. That reminds me: WBD heralds the coming of another important feast day, for Gertrude of Nivelles, the patron saint of cats and catlovers, on March 17th. I hope that you enjoy either or both of these celebrations.
Nickianne Moody, ARPF Convenor, Liverpool John Moores University.
Broadbent, T (2000) ‘Reading and literacy- how advertising mobilised parents to help improve the reading ability of their children’ Advertising Works 11 World Advertising Research Centre, Henley-on-Thames
Dean, J (2005) ‘Readers like us’ The Bookseller, February 11 ‘Expanding the Market Supplement’
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