Sant Jordi, books against all odds


Umbrellas, puddles, busy hands, a bit of cold and above all an annoying wind that messes up your hair, moves from place to place, dismantles a stall or shop window claim. After the pandemic, the last dragon facing the most exciting Sant Jordi that we can remember has scales from rain and wind storms, but once again, because good stories are repeated, the hero will use the epic and triumph.

If a deed has given us a positive identity throughout the history of humanity, this has been the desire to protect, care for and give continuity to reading. It would seem that the books carry printed on their pages a flame that does not extinguish and that pushes us to continue under construction, one step forward, umbrellas at the ready like spears, because on days like Sant Jordi one renders, whether consciously or not, a service in the crusade of the love of reading.

Epic is the work that they have been displaying for 200 years in the desert library city, Chinguetti, in Mauritania. There they are preserved half a dozen literary shelters raised in mud to protect a priceless heritage not only from outlaws and guerrillas, but above all from the threat of dust and dunes since the days when we had not put a name to the climate crisis.

war in ukraine

Also incalculable is the tenacity of a group of cultural activists who fight against the barbarism of the war in Ukraine through the preservation of digitized books that preserve the history of the country and that are threatened by hackers and cyber attacks.

A Ukrainian librarian was the one who pushed the initiative, which has ended up mobilizing more than a thousand experts in tracking heritage at risk from war and it has given refuge, in computer servers shielded against evil warfare, to poems and stories of the first Jewish settlements in the area, among other cultural gems.

sponsor a book

It is not war but if necessary what moves much closer, in Catalonia, an initiative of the University of Barcelona. Patrons are sought these days who, with their contribution, will help pay for the restoration work of two of the most valuable books preserved in the archive: a treatise on light from the 17th century called ‘Ars magna lucis et umbrae in decem libro digesta’ and another of trips that illuminated the knowledge of 500 years ago thanks to the passion of Melchisédech Thévenot, in love with the stories of expeditions to distant cultures.

The UB proposes the rescue of those books that threaten to disappear as a sponsorship, as Somehow we make Sant Jordi’s day every time we choose a book to give away and lovingly give it a shelter, a meaning, a vessel -we are vessels- where to pour its story.

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Sometimes, the connection is so intimate with a book that you buy the one you read to give it as a gift in a chain of affection in which you share the emotions it made you feel. A full-fledged “Spread the word”. The habit creates a community of literary godfathers: you give away what you liked and at the same time buy another identical book so that you never lose that novel that you may need to reread, to save it from being out of print in the future. You fear the loss, with the disappearance of the book, of those moments of emotion that made you feel and that are already part of your being, your identity.

Books may be discontinued, censored, burned or bombed, hacked. But days like Sant Jordi with its pandemic and storm-proof tenacity, and the thousand and one initiatives that are reproduced at all hours so that books endure remind us that they will never be defeated.


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