Notebook: Holiday Book Flood

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

In Iceland they have a holiday tradition called the Jólabókaflóð, or Christmas book flood. It dates from World War II, when many goods were rationed, but not paper. The Icelandic book trade began in 1944 to publish a catalogue of all new books every November, on the occasion of the annual Reykjavik Book Fair, and to send it to every household in Iceland (shades of our own cinder-block-sized Sears catalogue), and Icelanders became accustomed to ordering books for each other from the catalogue, unwrapping them on Christmas Eve, and settling down for an evening of reading and drinking hot chocolate. Perhaps not entirely as a result of this happy tradition, Icelanders are huge readers: according to a 2013 study, half of Icelandic people read more than eight books a year, and 93 percent of Icelanders read at least one book a year, making it a much more dispersed book economy than most countries, whose purchasing is concentrated among fewer readers. Iceland also publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world in spite of the limited reach of its language: five titles for every thousand Icelanders.