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World Book Day Promotes Reading Worldwide
German Group to Celebrate by Writing and Publishing a Book in a Day
UNSESCO has declared 23 April World Book Day. The idea has spread rapidly and successfully over much of the world. It has become a festival of reading, a day to celebrate the pleasures of reading, writing, and books. The 23rd of April is a symbolic date for world literature, for on this date and in the same year of 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. It is also the date of birth or death of other prominent authors such as Maurice Druon, K.Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo. It was a natural choice for UNESCO's General Conference to pay a world-wide tribute to books and authors on this date, encouraging everyone, and in particular young people, to discover the pleasure of reading.In Mainz, Germany, Forty German authors will try and set a world record by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours. Stiftung Lesen, a Mainz-based foundation that promotes reading, will give the team of writers a topic at 7.45 a.m. on April 23. The goal is to have the finished book on shop shelves in 10 German cities by the evening of that same day. Each author's contribution is to be about two pages, and the book will be an estimated 96 pages long.
"Generally, people associate writing a book with years of brain-racking and reflection. We wanted to make the point that print literature can still hold its own in the age of the Internet," spokesman Christoph Schaefer told Reuters news service. Last year, the foundation marked World Book Day by publishing the world's biggest children's detective book, in which 17,000 children provided a separate ending to an initial story idea.