Next Monday is every Literature teacher’s favourite holiday (it is, isn’t it?): Sant Jordi’s –book day here in Catalonia. Holiday not in the sense that we Catalans don’t work on that day, but in the sense that civil society takes the streets to celebrate reading –or so claim the authorities on popular Catalan festivities. For the uninitiated, all bookshops set up stalls outdoors and offer a 10% discount on their wares; in the major bookshops people queue to have their books signed by their favourite authors (I might pay a fetishistic visit to Chuck Palahniuk…).
This was all invented by the booksellers’ guild back in the 1920s, I think, though I have no idea how this got entangled with lovers’ day, which is also 23rd April here (um, yes, hero, princess, dragon…really?). Here’s the (changing) sexist tradition for you: men get books from their women, women get roses from their men (not necessarily boyfriends, though woe betide the boyfriend who does not spend an outrageous amount of money on a rose he could get much cheaper on any other day). This is changing in the sense that women are getting these days both roses and books, though I don’t know how many men get roses from their women, with or without books.
Anyway, I love the sight of so many men walking the streets roses in hand, though I tend to avoid the crowds buying books on that day. I do my Sant Jordi book shopping beforehand as, well, I hate buying book on Sant Jordi’s day. Not just because it’s crowded but mainly because it is crowded… No, I haven’t lost it. Picking a book in a crowd is quite uncomfortable under any circumstance (no peace, no quiet) but what I rather mean is that these crowds are only found on that day. Where are they the other 364 days, I wonder? Buying books online? Sant Jordi always reminds me of that awful celebration in which women rule a village for one day because they don’t the rest of the year. Same thing.
Well, here’s the problem: how do you choose books for your non-academic loved ones? It’s easy if you’re happy to get any of the novelties, for Sant Jordi is the biggest book-selling campaign in Spain (yes, not just in Catalonia). Sales amount to 25% of the yearly total… on a single day. Quite another matter is whether you want to pick up a particular book, which needs planning in advance, plenty of net surfing and trusting that delivery will be, as promised, on time (you tell me!!). Mostly, crowds and even Literature teachers end up buying whatever is at hand. This year –and this is really what I wanted to write about– I have given up the attempt to buy my mother a copy of the Spanish translation of Anne Brontë’s The Tennant of Wildfell Hall, a novel I’m teaching, as a) the cheaper paperback copy is very hard to find, b) the trade paperback copy is equally hard to find and pricey (above 25 euros for a classic out of copyright??). Call me Catalan, I mean tight-fisted, but my hard-earned money has been finally invested in this time of crisis on books more at hand (a Follett, a Steinbeck). My mum doesn’t read my blog, don’t worry (and she gets books from me and my family more often than just once a year…).
I forgot to say that though I do get a spectacular rose every Sant Jordi, I never get books, as my family is in a panic that I’ve read everything published under the sun –a good excuse, my cheeky ones! It seems I let this out last year –poor me, nobody buys me books– and my mum got so sorry for me that she decided to brave it out and buy me a novel. A non-English one, just in case. She got me Margaret Mazzantini’s La palabra más hermosa, which I did enjoy very much. Thank you, mum!
And, so, my mum got very happy that she had managed the hardest feat: giving a Literature teacher a book as a present and getting it right! Poor thing, I hope this Sant Jordi is less stressful for her… perhaps I should give her some hint?