I’ve just spent some of the happiest hours of recent months re-arranging my collection of children’s books.

I’ve done it by my soon-to-be patented Emotional Dewey Decimal System – a section for best-loved books of my youth, plus a subsection for the four extra copies of all-time great The Phantom Tollbooth acquired over the years, a section for the most significant (not the same thing), second-tier favourites the next shelf down, children’s books I’ve read and loved since near the wall, the unloved towards the bottom, and so on. It’s impenetrable to the untutored eye but instantly clear to me.

It’s a system that reflects how important books are to children. So I learn with despair of the latest findings from the National Literacy Trust which show that a third of all children – nearly four million – do not own a single book.

Not a single one! No Little Women (even if Beth is a drip who’s better off expiring on the sofa), no The Secret Garden with furious Mary and proto-sex-god Dickon! No buns for tea with The Railway Children! Imagine.

The absence of books in a life is indubitably A Bad Thing – knowledge made inaccessible, windows onto other worlds shuttered, a galaxy of pleasures unknown, intellectual impoverishment immeasurable and so on. And it’s especially so when you think about just what else that absence signifies.

Books and reading are a luxury. They require not just cash but what sociologists call ‘social capital’ – an amorphous entity that includes the time and energy to seek books out and then read them, a calm environment in which to do so, an awareness that these things are on offer, and a rough working knowledge of how to access them and distinguish between rather than become overwhelmed by the choices on offer. Spare time, energy, and peace and quiet are primarily the preserve of the already relatively privileged. And an awareness of what’s being published is absorbed by cultural osmosis via newspapers, programmes and websites which again are generally aimed at and accessed by people who have already accrued certain advantages and a degree of comfort in their lives.

“The absence of books in a life is a bad thing”