Give a book a home.

Ever since I can remember, I have loved reading. What is it about those little black-ink shapes on paper? How is it that they can transport you to a different time, a different world? What magic do they hold that you can momentarily live in the Amazon Jungle, or climb Everest? What on earth makes these little black shapes so special that simply by looking at them you can become a murder detective or a drug smuggler and why do we love them so much?

La Fiesta del Libro (The Book Festival) in Medellin is a testament to this magic. Located among the towering trees and beautiful architecture of the Orquidiorama in the city´s Botanic Gardens, it draws thousands of literary adventurers, science nerds, searchers of truths and all other types of bookworm. The internet, kindles and other technology may have all but killed the printed word but this event is living proof that it is still hanging in there and people still can´t seem to replace the feel, smell and page-turning beauty of a good book.

I visited the book fair on Saturday evening, a day that is traditionally, for most people, the day they do all the chores they don´t get around to during the week, and I was taken right back to my childhood again, when I would lose myself between the covers of a good book and travel to another world to live a thousand lives. On entering, the first stand I came across was selling what looked like books taken straight from the library of a haunted house, leather bound, dusty and with character oozing from their pages, all at a very reasonable price of 5.000 pesos or about 2 Euro. I browsed but found nothing I was looking for. I was on the hunt for something by Jorge Luis Borges , Umberto Eco or Pesoa as recommended to me by a bookworm friend.

My search would prove to be a long and enjoyable one. In my search for these authors I was forced to flick, burrow and dig through thousands and thousands of books, old, new, wrinkled, loved, colourful, decorated, plain, illustrated, forgotten, thick and slim and it occurred to me that each of these books was written lovingly by its author, be it last year or in some cases, hundreds of years ago. Each word within every book was chosen carefully to convey the ideas that existed in the minds of those authors. Within that park, for the days of the festival , exists an infinite amount of worlds and characters, real and imagined, living out their stories over and over.

All those books are sitting there, waiting to be picked up, waiting to tell their story, their worlds, sleeping and waiting to be explored by the next person to pick them up and release their magic. I noticed patterns. I began to recognise authors whose names appeared continuously on the covers. Some I was familiar with, there was Joyce, Shakespeare, Beckett, Elliot, Cervantes, Garcia Marquez, but more that I did not recognise. I began to become familiar with who were considered to be the best writers.

I wondered, what makes a good writer? The majority of the writers on display in that mountain of books, may have only written one or very few books, and most will never be recognised for their work. Most will disappear into obscurity and will never be spoken of in the same sentence as Borges, Dylan Thomas, Bukowski et al. and some may lie in waiting and never be read. What happens to these words? They will not survive. They will not be translated into other languages and once out of print will more than likely never be reproduced. Those ideas, those words are lost forever, just like our thoughts. But the authors who write these books, do so, hoping that their words and thoughts will live on and reach others. Its sad to think that these forgotten, unloved, untouched books will die just like their authors. If we go to heaven, is there a heaven for books? Is there a heaven for our thoughts?

So in a way, this is a call to arms for all book lovers. Let´s keep this beautiful medium alive. Let´s not let the craft and effort of some of our greatest imaginations and writers, go to waste. What happens when the plug is pulled on our computers and we lose all of our digital information? How will our future selves know about our civilisation? The only records they will have will be stored between the wrinkled pages of ancient books. So give a book a home and let it live today.