Knowledge and community

April 23 is one of Catalonia's most popular annual festivals, and it is not hard to see why. At once a national celebration, it also largely takes place outdoors and is also an event that welcomes the arrival of spring. The tradition of gifting a rose to one's beloved makes it far classier than Saint Valentine's Day with its sentimentality, sugary hearts and odious pink teddy bears. Yet, it is above all a celebration of books and reading, a cause that few would contest, whether they read much or not. Books are good, reading is good, so good in fact that Unesco chose the day for its World Book Day.

Thus, the importance of Sant Jordi cannot be understated, especially for the publishing industry. We focus on both of these aspects of April 23 in our multi-paged report on the festival on pages 22 to 35. Apart from book recommendations from a variety of public figures, who provide plenty of suggestions if you are looking for a book to give this year, there is also a look into one of the most popular literary genres: biography and memoir. If you haven't already done so, I urge you to take a look before you put this magazine down.

Publishers have been hard hit by the recession, as many of us have the mistaken belief that books are a luxury, like CDs or films (that should get the angry emails rolling in). However, whether on paper or nowadays in digital form, books are perhaps the key to the consolidation and expansion of human knowledge. As a society, we just cannot afford to live without them. That's why it seems very appropriate that there should be a day set aside to celebrate and encourage reading, to remind ourselves that all we are and everything we have is thanks to the store of human knowledge and that for centuries books have been the main way that knowledge has been imparted and diffused.

Before I finish I'd also like to point out one other aspect of Sant Jordi's Day that I find worthwhile. As mentioned above, it is a festival that takes place outside and attracts crowds of people buying roses and perusing book stalls. That fact turns the day into a social event. I read in a book recently (Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari – put this down immediately and go and read that instead) that the success of our species is mainly down to our social capacities, which no other animal can compete with. Sant Jordi is one of those days when humans (at least in Catalonia) take time out of their day to mill about and voluntarily interact as a community . Even a cynical curmudgeon like me can see that.