WORLD BOOK DAY

World Book and Copyright Day (also known as International Day of the Book or World Book Days) is a yearly event on 23 April, organised by UNESCO to promote reading, publishing and copyright. The Day was first celebrated in 1995.
The connection between 23 April and books was first made in 1923 by booksellers in Catalonia (Spain) as a way to honour the author Miguel de Cervantes who died on that day. This became a part of the celebrations of the Saint George's Day (also 23 April) in the region, where it has been traditional since the medieval era for men to give roses to their lovers and since 1925 for the woman to give a book in exchange. Half the yearly sales of books in Catalonia are at this time with over 400,000 sold and exchanged for over 4 million roses.
In 1995, UNESCO decided that the World Book and Copyright Day would be celebrated on this date because of the Catalonian festival and because the date is also the anniversary of the birth and death of William Shakespeare, the death of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Josep Pla, the birth of Maurice Druon, Vladimir Nabokov, Manuel Mejía Vallejo and Halldór Laxness.

This book comes from my collection and it is about the different ways to question people at the time of "holy" Inquisition and it was published in 1705.
It's a sort of "manual of the good Inquisitor" and it is the evidence of human madness.
In the 13th century, the pope assigned the duty of carrying out inquisitions to the Dominican Order. Inquisitors acted in the name of the Pope and with his full authority. They used inquisitorial (torture) procedures, which was a common law practice at the time. They judged heresy alone, using the local authorities to establish a tribunal and prosecute heretics. After the end of the fifteenth century, inquisitions were headed by a Grand Inquisitor. Inquisition in this way persisted until the 19th century.

I choosed this book to emphasize how human being is able to come down in the name of blind religious integralism of any kind...
To reassure all my friends I'm not a maniac, I must say that I have hundreds of different books in my collection, fiction, classics, history, essays, poetry, cartoons and more :)