One Book - but more to come?

Published on Thursday 1 February 2007 01:24

YESTERDAY saw the launch of "One Book - One Edinburgh", a campaign to popularise the reading habit and to publicise the capital's title of UNESCO City of Literature. Some 35,000 free copies of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped will go to every school and library in Edinburgh until stocks run out.

They will include 7,500 copies of a new version of Kidnapped, told as a graphic novel. The latter might seem at odds with the injunction to read more, but it also shows a welcome determination to spread the word about great Scottish literature.

What next after Kidnapped? The novelist Ian Rankin has suggested Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Hound of the Baskervilles. These are great Scottish books, though some might find them - perhaps unjustly - a trifle on the safe side. What about an Alexander Trocchi or an Alastair Maclean (in his day, the biggest-selling author in the world)? And what constitutes a Scottish book anyway? Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was written here.

However, here is another suggestion. Books need homes, and spending on school, public and university libraries remains paltry. If Scotland is to produce the literature of tomorrow, it needs more libraries for today.