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.