World Book Day
The above title will make most booksellers snort with laughter. World Book Week or fortnight is more like it. Nevertheless, it is a highlight within the Booka calendar where we focus on our work with schools and young readers.
We host an all singing, all dancing week (or fortnight), welcoming school groups to the shop, taking authors into schools, running our ‘Alternative Book Fairs’ and handing out WBD books.
As a bookshop it is an opportunity for us to engage with our community, to actively grow readers. Over the years we have hosted some incredible events for local schools.
I remember the first large scale event we did way back in 2019 at The Marches School. We had 5 children’s authors who were going to put on a Variety Style performance – Olaf Falafel, Andy Griffiths, Katherine Woodfine, Abi Elphinstone, Jennifer Bell and Steven Butler, to inspire children to read for pleasure.
This was a real coup for a provincial bookshop as only 5 of these large-scale events were hosted around the country -usually in city locations. I had pitched hard to bring ‘The Biggest Book Show on Earth’ to somewhere less obvious ……..but equally deserving.
It was an incredible amount of work to coordinate and I remember on the morning of the show, we woke up to snow! Despite this, the show went ahead and WBD 2019 was one of the biggest and most memorable that we have been involved with.
In 2020, we decided to create our own WBD Roadshow event for local schools. We called it ‘Booka’s World Book Day Author Bonanza’ hosted this time by Oswestry School in their Momentum Hall.
It will stay in my memory for a long time as it was one of the final events we did before the first national lock-down of 2020. We hosted around 1000 pupils over two sessions – one for KS1 (6+) and the other for KS2 (8+).
The following two years, 2021 we hosted events online via Zoom as schools and authors were still very nervous about travelling around the country and congregating in large groups.
In 2023 we have a full week of author visits but did not quite manage to organise a multi-school event – the cost of living rise and uncertainty around strike action for railways and teachers made planning for this difficult, but we hope to be back with our ‘Big Book Show’ in 2024.
This year we are very content to be taking 4 authors into 6 different schools:
On Tuesday we had the pleasure of hosting local-ish author Donna David who lives in Shifnal. We visited Woodside Primary in the morning and Our Lady and St Oswald Catholic Primary in the afternoon. Donna was talking about two of her picture books, Planes, Planes, Planes and Farmer Llama to children aged 4-7 years old. 
It was a highly entertaining event with a game and an interactive demonstration of how a book gets from the initial idea to the finished book – using children to play the different roles of author, agent, publisher, illustrator, bookseller etc. Donna pitched it perfectly for the age and both teachers and children had a jolly nice time. We hope to work with her again in the future.
A double header on Thursday. Tim took the amazing Frank Cottrell-Boyce to Woodside Primary and The Meadows to talk about his latest novel ‘Noah’s Gold’.
It’s a hugely funny and entertaining adventure about a school trip that goes wrong, missing teachers, broken internet and a group of young school pupils working together to survive on an Island. There are pesky robbers and of course GOLD.
We have worked with Frank on numerous occasions before. He is one of the nicest authors and an instinctive story-teller. He has strong links with Oswestry as he officially opened the new Oswestry Library, post austerity. He has a new book coming out in July called ‘The Wonder Brothers’ – about two magicians who go on an adventure from Blackpool to Las Vegas and back.
If you don’t know Frank as a children’s author, you may know that he co-wrote the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics and the screenplay for The Railway Man starring Colin Firth. He is also writing the screenplay for the next Paddington movie. He’s a very busy, mulit-talented writer and it is always a huge pleasure to work with him.
I was with award winning Welsh author and screen writer, Caryl Lewis who visited Oswestry School (Bellan) and Ellesemere Primary to talk about her incredible book ‘Seed’
– think contemporary take on ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and to some extent, Roald Dahl’s ‘James and the Giant Peach’. It’s a book about growing a seed, but also about growing people and dreams. The characters get to re-story their lives. It’s a heartwarming, multi-layered tale that will delight readers.
The magic doesn’t stop there – Caryl also has a new book coming in June called, ‘The Magician’s Daughter’.
What a coincidence that both Frank and Caryl are writing books with similar themes. As bookseller’s we find this happens a lot – Magic must be the new trend in children’s books, just like there seems to be a ‘Witch’ trend in adult fiction.
Caryl also writes for adults and her book ‘Drift’ (soon to be published in paperback) is a powerful story of love and magic against the backdrop of the Welsh Coast.
Another coincidence is that Caryl is also a screenwriter and has been involved in writing for the Welsh TV series, Hidden and Hinterland.
On Friday, we ventured further afield to The Queen’s School in Chester with the hugely talented and award-winning Hannah Gold. Last year we hosted Zoom events with Hannah on WBD so it was really great to meet her ‘in real life’. Hannah was talking about her books, The Last Bear and The Lost Whale but also about her new book for children, Finding Bear, due to be published in September.
This is a sequel to ‘The Last Bear’ and we can’t wait. It won the Blue Peter Book Award in 2022 and rightly so. It is one of those immersive animal stories about a young girl who travels with her Scientist father to Svalbard. She spends a lot of time exploring the island and helps to free a wounded polar bear. It’s a book that brings the power and fragility of nature vividly to life and through story highlights the dangers facing the natural world. Epic and unforgettable. 
Our Children’s Team, Sian and Imi hosted an Alternative Book Fair for St Winifredes in Shrewsbury as well as running a one-off Teen Bookclub at Oswestry School in their new library.
In total we will have more than 1000 school children visit the shop to collect their WBD book.
The WBD books for 2023 offer a varied and exciting range of stories and facts from mainstream authors and celebrities. You can view the selection here. Then pop in to the shop to exchange your WBD voucher for a WBD book.
World Book Day is a fabulous Charity with a key mission: ‘to promote reading for pleasure by offering every child and young person the opportunity to choose and own a book’
We are committed to helping this process and we see it as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility.
As you can see WBD is something we are passionate about – it brings children and adults into the shop who might never have crossed the threshold before. Hopefully, we break down some barriers and get more people to realise that Booka is a ‘Bookshop for Everyone’ and that ‘Everyone is a Reader’ – sometimes they just have to find the right book for them to realise this.
We are always on hand to make recommendations and talk about the books we love. And if you want an extra special gift for a loved one or yourself, why not ask about our new ‘Passion for Books’ subscription.
Come on down and find out what we are reading!