Everyone here at Mightier Than the Sword UK absolutely love World Book Day! Not only do we all have an excuse to read books all day as part of our sponsored readathon, but our facebook feeds and twitter feeds come alive with people posting about their favourite books and people dressing up as book characters!

From Cruella De Vil (Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmations) to the Three Witches (Shakespeare’s Macbeth) there really is something truly magical about seeing favourite book characters brought to life and running around the streets of the UK.

Every year for World Book Day, National Book Tokens, a collection of book retailers and publishers all come together to help get children reading. 14 million children in the UK are given a £1 World Book Day book token through their school – meaning that nearly everyone under the age of 18 in the UK gets a token.

This book token is almost as valuable as the golden tickets that Willy Wonka hid inside his chocolate wrappers (Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as it can be taken to any of the participating bookshops (the list can be found here) and traded in for any one of the ten £1 World Book Day books.

These books are:

For children aged 2 and up (and adults that remember the amazing Elmer book from their childhood) there are two books: Elmer’s Parade and The Dinosaur That Pooped A Lot!

For children aged 5 and up there are books titled A Pirate’s Guide To Landlubbing and Magic Animal Friends: Lucy Longwhiskers Finds A Friend.

For children aged 7 and up there is The Diary of Dennis the Menace (both Dennis and Nasher look far more insidious than they did when we were children) and Goth Girl And The Pirate Queen.

For children aged 9 and up there is a Michael Morpurgo book, Best Mates and Dork Diaries: How to be a dork!

 For young adults there is Geek Girl: Geek Drama and Killing the Dead.

After some hot debate here in the Mightier Than the Sword UK offices we have come to the conclusion that we should pool our pocket money and get hold of a copy of A Pirate’s Guide to Landlubbing as quite clearly it is a self-help book that everyone should own.

The easiest way to recognise a World Book Day book though is the World Book Day logo on the cover.