THE DAY OF BOOKS AND ROSES

Sant Jordi’s Day, Cat­alo­nia’s an­nual cel­e­bra­tion of ro­mance and read­ing on April 23, has to be one of the strangest fes­tiv­i­ties in the world. What you have is a spring fes­ti­val whose main sym­bol is a red rose, which in leg­end mag­i­cally bloomed from the blood of the dragon slain by Saint George. It is not so hard to imag­ine the cin­e­matic ver­sion, with the vic­to­ri­ous hero stoop­ing in clank­ing ar­mour to pluck the rose from the blood-drenched ground and hand­ing it to the beau­ti­ful young woman he has just saved from death in a ges­ture of courtly love that will be im­i­tated for cen­turies to come. But the books?

In 1995, UN­ESCO de­clared April 23 to be World Book Day, be­cause it is the an­niver­sary of the deaths of two of the world’s great­est ever writ­ers, Cer­vantes and Shake­speare. (As an aside, Shake­speare is also sup­posed to have been born on April 23, but all we know for sure is that he was bap­tised on April 26 and it is tra­di­tion that says he was born three days ear­lier, on St George’s Day, Eng­land’s pa­tron saint, which is a neat co­in­ci­dence.)

Mean­while, April 23 is Sant Jordi’s Day in Cat­alo­nia, where there is the cu­ri­ous tra­di­tion of loved ones ex­chang­ing roses for books, in a sort of in­tel­lec­tu­alised ver­sion of St Valen­tine’s Day. Hand­ing some­one a red rose as a sign of ro­man­tic af­fec­tion is easy to un­der­stand, but for that per­son to then hand back a copy of Coper­ni­cus’s trans­la­tion of Theo­phy­lact Simo­catta’s Epis­tles, for ex­am­ple, is much harder to imag­ine.

Clearly it is the quirky na­ture of Sant Jordi’s Day that makes it stand out as a fes­tiv­ity, and which gar­ners it so much in­ter­na­tional at­ten­tion and leads pub­li­ca­tions like ours to de­vote mul­ti­ple pages to cov­er­ing the cel­e­bra­tion (see pages 17 to 19). As un­likely a combo as it might seem at first glance, mix­ing books and roses, ro­mance and read­ing, has turned out to be a bit of a mas­ter­stroke. While the love el­e­ment goes way back to the 15th cen­tury, the book side of the feast day only began in the 1920s, when April 23 was cho­sen as a good day for mar­ket­ing books and which is the ori­gin of the book­stalls in the street.

A hun­dred years later, thou­sands upon thou­sands of peo­ple will pour onto the streets of Cat­alo­nia to stroll and browse stalls in the spring sun while buy­ing roses and books. By pro­mot­ing Sant Jordi’s Day as a cen­turies-old tra­di­tion and a true test of one’s love and af­fec­tion, the book in­dus­try gets to sell books, which is even more im­por­tant at a time when ever fewer peo­ple are read­ing. Nowhere near as many books would be sold if it were merely World Book Day with­out the leg­end, the roses and ro­mance. Mar­ket­ing, it seems, is noth­ing new and it is a les­son that In­ter­na­tional Wheel­chair Day (March 1) or Wikipedia Day (Jan­u­ary 15) would do well to learn.

opin­ion