Book buying tradition should add value to gifting – Armenia marks Book Gifting Day today

February 19, which marks great Armenian poet Hovhannes Tumanyan’s birthday, is also traditionally celebrated as a day of book gifting in the country.

Literary critic David Gasparyan describes the day’s message as an attempt to bring a human being closer to the book. According to him, learning to buy books is even much more important than spreading the culture of gifting them to people.
 
“We must speak about the book’s value today to attract people to gift books to one another not only on this day but also on private occasions. There are really wonderful books. So why don’t they buy them? Because everything has its era, and books now seem to have fallen out of fashion. Yes, not everybody reads, and books even used to be considered part of the house furniture. But people knew the books’ value; they knew children must read,” Gasparyan said.

Asked whether he agrees that people do not spend money on books because they are considered too expensive in a socially insecure country like Armenia, the literary critic admitted the problem to an extent. “Social problems do certainly exist because [a book] is not a cheap pleasure, but anyway they are possible to overcome if one is dedicated to books,” he added.

Commenting on readers’ preferences, Harutyunyan said most people now tend to read historical-biographic literature.

“They prefer the books that contain a real history and human biography,” he said.

Literary critic Meruzhan Ter-Gulanyan said he disagrees the opinions that advent of advanced technologies is likely to ever diminish books’ value. Noting that such fears always existed after every new invention (radio, television, computers), Ter-Gulanyan said he knows that life has always proven the contrary.

“People reading books exist also today. It is simply important to write well; an interesting book must be written. It is impossible for a human being to be isolated from reading; as long as the human being exists, book will keep living. Books are eternal. So our task now is to revitalize the culture of reading books,” he added.

Ter-Gulanyan said he really expects the book gifting culture to gain more attraction. “People will learn it. Everything new starts from something little, so we are required to kind of infect each other,” he added.