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“World Book Day is celebrated every year on April 23rd,” notes Calendar Labs—and note how the holiday’s official logo looks more like boobs than books (above left, alongside a similarly upright scholar).

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) created and organizes the annual event, which “aims to promote reading habits among people, especially the youth, all around the globe.” And speaking of globes, the alluring image below is actually an open book!

“The first ever World Book Day was celebrated on April 23, 1995,” one historian notes, “because it was the birth and death anniversary of William Shakespeare, the world’s most famous author.” And this year, fittingly, marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 1616. So, as luck would have it {to quote the Bard’s words from The Merry Wives of Windsor}, the game’s afoot {coined in Henry V} as we come full circle {first used in King Lear} to reveal the naked truth {Love’s Labor’s Lost}. Why, Shakespeare even introduced two other phrases that live on today in his Hamlet: “in the mind’s eye” and “flaming youth”…both of which apply to the Coed Topless Book Appreciation Society that held its first meeting in Central Park on August 12, 2011:

“There’s nothing hotter than a beautiful woman reading a book,” raves Ranker.com. “I mean, other than a beautiful woman reading a book who is also naked.” And that’s true on beaches worldwide this World Book Day weekend, whether the figure study is unshaven or shorn!

And even when the sun goes down, the celebration continues with World Book Night, which originated in Shakespeare’s native England in 2011 “to inspire more people to read more, encourage them to share their enjoyment of reading with others and celebrate the difference that reading makes in all of our lives.”

In five short years, the nighttime ritual has spread to the world’s two most populous countries—India and China (below left right)—and millions of books have been given away to those who cannot afford them. Alas, the third most populous country on Earth, and the richest, announced after just 3 years that it was ceasing “Book Night USA operations for the foreseeable future in 2014, due to a lack of sustainable funding.” Couldn’t we have sold off some clothes?

Actually, the connection between books and April 23rd extends all the way back to 1923, in honor of another world famous writer who died on the same day as Shakespeare in 1616—Miguel de Cervantes, best known for Don Quixote. For centuries, April 23rd was celebrated as “The Rose Day” in his native Spain, when people would share roses to show their love and support, much like our Valentine’s Day. But to increase sales in the early Twenties, Spanish booksellers in Catalonia decided to mark the day Cervantes passed away…and so “people exchanged books instead of roses in order to commemorate the death of the great author. The tradition continues to this day in Spain and that’s where the idea of World Book Day came about.” And also in 1923, a comely kindred spirit in America combined studying and stripping for the camera!

Nearly a century before, a popular painting depicted a ravishing redhead reader in the nude—a mind/body connection that many find “incredibly erotic.” In the words of Britain’s esteemed paper The Guardian: “The female reader—naked or clothed, in bed or outdoors, has always fascinated artists. And it cited one of its great “Solitary Pleasures” to be Thomas Roussel’s classic The Reading Girl, which caused a scandal when first exhibited in 1887: “It is realism of the worst kind,” sneered The Spectator. “The eye of the artist sees only the vulgar appearance of his model, making it blunt and crude.

To be blunt, the model was nude not crude…she was the most popular artist muse of the day, 19-year-old Hetty Pettigrew, who not only posed for—and had a child by—the randy Roussel, but was also a favorite subject of his mentor James Whistler (and hotter than his mother!) as well as British painter Walter Sickert—linked via DNA in 2002 by crime expert Patricia Cornwell as having been Jack the Ripper!

“I do believe 100% that Walter Richard Sickert committed those crimes, that he is the Whitechapel murderer,” Cromwell claimed in a TV special. She concluded that “a congenital defect in Sickert’s penis, coupled with his failure to procreate from any of his three marriages and numerous affairs {including with Ms. Pettigrew}, turned him into a serial killer.” And that his 1907 painting titled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom and 1908 work The Camden Town Murder (below) were his canvas confessions.

Likely the most revered reading revelation by a celebrity was Halle Berry’s first foray into nudity in the 2001 film Swordfish, for which she demanded—according to its director Dominic Sena—“half a million” bucks (beyond her $2M salary) to bare both breasts: “Five hundred thousand dollars,” Sena sighed to reporters. “Yep, $250,000 per.” Which was more than worth it when she signed the sequence for the Sleuth!

So without further ado…another phrase popularized by Shakespeare (who died exactly 4 centuries before this year’s World Book Day)…let’s count down—fittingly from bottom to top—the Ten Hottest Celebrity BOOK ‘ENDS’ we’d like to back up to Between the Covers! These book buffs are stacked…and speak for themselves. In a nut shell: Read ’em and…bleep.”

10. ANNA FARIS – HouseBunny star shares her house with hubby Chris {Jurassic World} Pratt

9. KARLIE KLOSS– 32-23-34 supermodel from St. Louis and rumored lesbian lover of Taylor Swift

8. DAKOTA FANNING – Karlie’s classmate at NYU and niece of ESPN reporter Jill Arrington, she “began learning to read at age two”

7. JANE FONDA– “I’m having the best sex of my life!” says the 1959 Vassar graduate and fitness book guru

6. JULIANNE MOORE – 1983 Boston U. grad wrote 6 children’s books titled Freckleface Strawberry

5. GABRIELLE UNION – Graduated with honors in sociology from UCLA and married NBA star Dwyane Wade in 2014, even though he’d fathered a child by another woman the year before

4. JANE BIRKIN – Now a dame, first husband John Barry wrote the James Bond Theme and Goldfinger; longtime lover Serge Gainsbourg (below left) fathered actress daughter Charlotte; and she’s namesake for the chic Hermes ‘Birkin Bag’—a leather handbag that sells for as much as $150,000

3. OLIVIA WILDE – Born Olivia Jane Cockburn, she’s a direct descendent of Scottish literary legend Lord Henry Cockburn but took stage name from Irish author Oscar Wilde

Saying she and husband Jason Sudekis “have sex like Kenya marathon runners,” Olivia openly read kinky Fifty Shades of Grey in a bookstore (above left)…and she's hard•ly alone:

2. BETTIE PAGE – Voted ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ and salutatorian of her high school class, she won a scholarship to Peabody College (now Vanderbilt Univ.) before becoming kinky ‘Queen of the Pinups’

And, the Number One ‘Book End’ we’d love to read (and breed) with on this world holiday, is …

1. MARILYN MONROE – Said to have “a higher I.Q. (163) than that of Albert Einstein (160),” the screen legend knew how to use her looks: “Boys think girls are like books,” she surmised. “If the cover doesn’t catch their eye, they won’t bother to read what’s inside.”

One can never have “too much of a good thing,” birthday boy Bill Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth in 1606…and two years earlier coined the phrase, “All’s Well That ENDS Well”…

So we hope you’ve learned…and yearned…from this literary ode to National Book Day. After all, as Sleuth says, “You can’t spell LITERATURE without T and A.”