Operating on the narrowest of profit margins, most publishers of books in the Welsh language simply cannot afford to exhibit at the Education Show in Cardiff. Nor for that matter can they find the money to bombard schools with lavish mailshots, mount promotional stunts or employ educational reps.

Instead, they call on the services of the educational department of the Welsh Books Council (WBC). Funded by the Assembly and the Welsh education authorities, the WBC is an umbrella organisation representing all the Welsh publishing houses and acting as an indispensable link between them and potential young readers.

The Council has a small team of field officers who visit schools and libraries. Its bilingual website (at www.cllc.org.uk) has a lively children’s section, which is devoted to titles in both English and Welsh and packed with news, reviews, interviews with authors, and competitions.

For the past 18 years, the Council has run Sbondonics, a classroom-based book club. It oversees a knockout competition in which rival schools champion their favourite authors and titles. This has proved to be such a success in Welsh-medium schools that this year a similar scheme for pupils whose first language is English is being piloted in four local authorities.

These and other initiatives - including book awards, theatre in education performances, and the services of a children’s poet laureate, Mei Mac, are designed not only to sell books to children but, more importantly, to sell them the idea that reading is fun.

The Council’s latest catalogue of children’s books in Welsh reflects the success of the small publishing houses in meeting the needs of teachers, parents and youngsters. It includes textbooks, fiction, non-fiction, English bestsellers in translation and an impressively varied list of titles ranging from Cnoi, Cnoi, a chewable tome for “tiny teethers” to a Welsh study aid in A-level modular chemistry.

The WBC also promotes English-language books that have a relevance to Wales. These will prove increasingly important to teachers in English-medium schools - or, at least, for those who are prepared to meet the enormous challenge of Y Curriculum Cymreig, which requires that a Welsh dimension be incorporated in the syllabus of all subjects taught in primary and secondary schools in Wales.

For a definitive guide to books in both languages which may be of use in the classroom, teachers should visit www.gwales.com, a website maintained by WBC. The site provides a database of 17,500 books in print with at least 1,000 more being added every year. Once you have made your choices, rather than having to go through the rigmarole of contacting the individual publishers, you can order all the books online from the Council’s distribution centre in Aberystwyth.

The town, which is also home to the Council itself and the National Library of Wales, is indisputably the capital of Welsh literature. It is fitting, then, that it should be the venue for the WBC’s annual Children’s Book Conference on November 1-2, 2002.