The Most Important Books in History: Red Edition

As you might have guessed, we’re fans of the old written word over here at Succeed With Dyslexia – and even though sometimes it’s tricky or stressful when you’ve got literacy differences, the act of reading is something that everybody should have access to support and strategies for. It’s a fact of life that being able to read a road sign, or settle down with a book in the evening, or deal with tricky transport timetables shouldn’t be something that people feel blocked out from or intimidated by, and we want to create and foster a world where everybody with dyslexia and literacy differences can go on to read and succeed.

And this month, we’re celebrating Go Red for Dyslexia – this is where during Dyslexia Awareness Month in October, we come together as a global community to support people with dyslexia and literacy differences by raising awareness, celebrating their creativity and taking a peek at all the amazing things that they can do. That’s why in this little fun-packed article, we’re focusing on the most important books in hisotry that feature the colour red in various shapes and forms – and as ever, if we’ve missed one, let us know in the comments below!

Let’s go…

The Red Book of Threatened Species
Not to start on a bit of a downer, but in an era where the future is threatening the survival of so many species the world over, it makes sense to start on a book we should pay some attention to these days. In 1963, the International Union for Conservation of Nature decided to address the breadth of endangered species in the creation of a document that would list and categorise the creatures that are at risk of disappearing for good. It’s still in use today, and is updated annually by experts in a variety of zoological and ecological fields. There’s also a full-scale review every four years where species are added or eliminated from the roster. Although some species, such as the Mountain Gorilla have seen a rise in numbers that take them from the ‘critically endangered’ to the ‘endangered’ margin, many species are slipping down the spectrum at an alarming rate, due to habitat destruction, changing climates and hunting to extinction.

Ruby the Red Fairy
Ruby the Red Fairy by Daisy Meadows is the first book of the Rainbow Magic series, and details the adventures of best friends Rachel and Kirsty as they set out to discover what’s happened to the missing rainbow fairies. It’s a fun, quirky and colourful take on the traditional fairy mythos, and the Rainbow Magic series is one that’s been credited with getting thousands of kids into reading, featuring realistic portrayals of young, female characters and adventure narratives that see children and young people acting with agency and showcasing their talents. It’s a fab quick read, and to be honest, we’d probably sneakily read it ourselves whilst the kids aren’t looking too.

The Red Book of Hergest
You might not find this one on the shelves of your local W. H. Smith or even that easily online, but it’s one of the most important books in linguistic history in the British Isles. It’s a large handwritten vellum manuscript bound in red leather dating from the 1380-1410 period. It contains early versions  of the foundations of Welsh language literature, including sections of The Mabinogion, a Welsh translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, and a significant amount of bardic poetry that helps us understand the way that people lived, fought, shared stories and even died during the Medieval period. It’s a bit of a monster, being one of the largest and heaviest books from this period in British history, and has a storied history that saw it move through a number of houses of the major nobility in the Welsh marches before finally finding a permanent home at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

The Little Red Book
The Little Red Book is a tie-in volume to The Big Book, a primary study and motivational text associated with the Alcoholics Anonymous programme. It functions as somewhat of a study guide for the larger volume, and is credited with outlining a workable programme for people who are struggling with their relationship with substances and are looking to make a change. It’s been adapted and reissued a number of times, and in 2004, Karen Casey and William Griffith Wilson created a version called The Little Red Book for Women that was specifically tailored to how women might experience addiction and recovery.

The Harvard Redbook
The Harvard Redbook a Harvard University report from 1945 all about the importance of general education in American secondary schools and post-secondary schools. It’s considered to be one of the most important works in the field of curriculum studies even today, over 75 years after its initial publication. It’s most commonly known as The Harvard Redbook, but its publication title is General Education in a Free Society, and was part of a reassessment of the courses that the university had on offer, and push back against what was then seen as an excessive push to specialise whilst in college education. It proposed that a general education – one where students learned a wider breadth of subjects in less depth, instead of developing a critical level understanding of one niche within a field- was much better for their development as academics, as well as giving them better skills to build on in their careers or postgraduate studies. It’s still used today as a treatise on the importance of a holistic higher education.

The Red Book of Westmarch
Is this one cheating if it’s a fictional book? Perhaps, but we’re nerds so we’re going for it anyway- The Red Book of Westmarch is a fictional book found in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s a manuscript said to be written by hobbits that details the events of The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings as they were recounted by the characters that took part in the events. It’s a conceit that breaks the fourth wall a little – when we’re reading these stories, it’s implied we’re reading the versions that have been written down in the Red Book. Its name comes from its red leather cover and its having been housed in Westmarch, a region in Middle Earth that sits close to the borders of The Shire (for those not in the know, that's where the small guys with the hairy feet live). Tolkien's Red Book is thought to be pretty heavily based on the Red Book of Hergest – a text that he would have known pretty well due to his love of Old English literature and research and specialisms where he taught at Oxford University.

Little Red Riding Hood
Little Red Riding Hood (sometimes known as Little Red Cap) is a European fairy tale about a young girl who, wearing a red cape or cloak, has a chilling encounter with a wolf from the woods whilst visiting her sickly grandmother. The best-known versions are by Charles Perrault and The Brothers Grimm, but it’s been told and re-told for centuries, with our earliest evidence of it coming from a 10^th-century French source, in the writings of the educator and author Egbert of Liege. It’s also one of the few very famous fairytales not to have been adapted into a feature film by Disney, but an animated short exists from 1922 – it’s considered Disney’s first real foray into animated storytelling, and was actually thought to be lost for many years before a British collector found a damaged copy in a London film library in 1998.

The Saga of Erik the Red
Eiríks saga rauða is an Icelandic saga on the Norse exploration of North America, and one of relatively few sources (collectively called the ‘Vinland Sagas’) that explores the westward journeys of the Viking people. Although it details the events that led to the banishment of Erik the Red to Greenland, it actually primarily focuses on the life and story of a woman called Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, and her journey across the sea to the land that would much later become known as the United States. She’s also the heroine of one of the best known paganism-to-Christianity conversion narratives from this era, and scholars have read a lot into the narrative as an example of the ways in which saga literature treats female figures and their agency.

So there we have it – adventures on the Viking seas, fairy tales of numerous varieties, and even a 1940s treatise on general studies in college-age education. We’re loving exploring all the ways we can Go Red for Dyslexia this October, and we’d love to see what you’ve been reading too – make sure to tag us on social media using #GoRedForDyslexia so that we can share the love!