April 23rd is the day for all book lovers and bookworms to celebrate World Book Day or World Book and Copyright Day. UNESCO celebrates this day every year on April 23rd in honor of great literary figures like William Shakespeare, Miguel Cervantes, Vladimir Nabokov, and many more. It is a day to honor these authors and their contributions to literature while promoting reading, publishing, and copyright.
Those born in the 1960s did not have access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other virtual platforms that we have today. There were no mobile phones, and the telephone was a wired device that was out of reach for many people. Telegram existed, but it was not like the current encrypted platform for secret data and voice calls. However, what we lacked in virtual things, we made up for in books. Great books written by great authors filled our hearts with soundness and nuanced our impressionable minds with thoughts of justice and peace.
We had access to a library of full-story books that included Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and George Orwell, but we also filled our social and knowledge world with local and foreign plays and novels, including detective, romance, fantasy, science, and mystery. Many of us bought and read almost 100 of James Hadley Chase’s enthralling thrillers.
The romantic readers enjoyed Barbara Cartland’s Lessons in Love, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. Mills and Boons books, a popular series of romantic novels, were also widely read. Bookish readers were hooked on Heinemann’s African Writers series, a collection of works by African authors. We also had The Pacesetters series with their varied themes and beauty, cover to cover.
