Retired broker in pursuit of literacy

A small secondhand bookshop in the North Devon seaside town of Appledore is where you will likely find retired shipbroker Barry Evetts — that is, during the summer when the weather, as he puts it, “is at least halfway decent”. Evetts chats to customers and sells books on behalf of literacy charity BookRelief UK, which he founded several years ago. “I’ve always enjoyed reading for pleasure when time permits,” mused Barry, who is also the author of “The Panama Affair” — a thriller with a shipping theme. “And I’m one of those people who needs a project in order to keep my brain active, and these days to take my mind off the battle I’ve been fighting with cancer. So when I discovered just how bad literacy levels were in this country, with one in six adults struggling to read and children in many cases seeing reading as something ‘uncool’, I decided to do something about it.” BookRelief UK has worked to improve the reading skills of local adults and children. Yet, with effectively a mountain of surplus used books in the UK, many of which just end up as landfill, much of sub-Saharan Africa suffers a book famine. BookRelief, in partnership with Exeter-based Book-Cycle, are sending used but still relevant and reusable textbooks as well as good quality reading books and children’s books to a variety of African beneficiaries. Anyone interested in helping can visit BookRelief UK’s Books by the Pallet-load for African Children webpage: http://www.globalgiving.co.uk/projects/books-by-the-pallet-load-for-african-children/.