Books vs. Cigarettes
A couple of years ago a friend of mine, a newspaper editor, was firewatching with some
factory workers. They fell to talking about his newspaper, which most of them read and
approved of, but when he asked them what they thought of the literary section, the answer he
got was: “You don't suppose we read that stuff, do you? Why, half the time you're talking
about books that cost twelve and sixpence! Chaps like us couldn't spend twelve and sixpence
on a book.” These, he said, were men who thought nothing of spending several pounds on a
day trip to Blackpool.
This idea that the buying, or even the reading, of books is an expensive hobby and beyond the
reach of the average person is so widespread that it deserves some detailed examination.
Exactly what reading costs, reckoned in terms of pence per hour, is difficult to estimate, but I
have made a start by inventorying my own books and adding up their total price. After
allowing for various other expenses, I can make a fairly good guess at my expenditure over
the last fifteen years.
The books that I have counted and priced are the ones I have here, in my flat. I have about an
equal number stored in another place, so that I shall double the final figure in order to arrive
at the complete amount. I have not counted oddments such as proof copies, defaced volumes,
cheap paper-covered editions, pamphlets, or magazines, unless bound up into book form. Nor
have I counted the kind of junky books-old school text-books and so forth — that accumulate
in the bottoms of cupboards. I have counted only those books which I have acquired
voluntarily, or else would have acquired voluntarily, and which I intend to keep. In this
category I find that I have 442 books, acquired in the following ways:
Bought (mostly second-hand)
251
Given to me or bought with book tokens 33
Review copies and complimentary copies 143
Borrowed and not returned
10
Temporarily on loan
5
Total
442
Now as to the method of pricing. Those books that I have bought I have listed at their full
price, as closely as I can determine it. I have also listed at their full price the books that have
been given to me, and those that I have temporarily borrowed, or borrowed and kept. This is
because book-giving, book-borrowing and bookstealing more or less even out. I possess
books that do not strictly speaking belong to me, but many other people also have books of
mine: so that the books I have not paid for can be taken as balancing others which I have paid
for but no longer possess. On the other hand I have listed the review and complimentary
copies at half-price. That is about what I would have paid for them second-hand, and they are
mostly books that I would only have bought second-hand, if at all. For the prices I have
sometimes had to rely on guesswork, but my figures will not be far out. The costs were as
follows
(*)
:
£ s. d.
Bought
36 9 0
Gifts
10 10 0
Review copies, etc
25 11 9
Borrowed and not returned 4 16 9
On loan
3 10 0
Shelves
2 0 0
Total
82
17
6
Adding the other batch of books that I have elsewhere, it seems that I possess altogether
nearly 900 books, at a cost of £165 15s. This is the accumulation of about fifteen years —
actually more, since some of these books date from my childhood: but call it fifteen years.
This works out at £11 1s. a year, but there are other charges that must be added in order to
estimate my full reading expenses. The biggest will be for newspapers and periodicals, and
for this I think £8 a year would be a reasonable figure. Eight pounds a year covers the cost of
two daily papers, one evening paper, two Sunday papers, one weekly review and one or two
monthly magazines. This brings the figure up to £19 1s, but to arrive at the grand total one
has to make a guess. Obviously one often spends money on books without afterwards having
anything to show for it. There are library subscriptions, and there are also the books, chiefly
Penguins and other cheap editions, which one buys and then loses or throws away. However,
on the basis of my other figures, it looks as though £6 a year would be quite enough to add
for expenditure of this kind. So my total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have
been in the neighbourhood of £25 a year.
Twenty-five pounds a year sounds quite a lot until you begin to measure it against other kinds
of expenditure. It is nearly 9s 9d a week, and at present 9s 9d is the equivalent of about 83
cigarettes (Players): even before the war it would have bought you less than 200 cigarettes.
With prices as they now are, I am spending far more on tobacco than I do on books. I smoke
six ounces a week, at half-a-crown an ounce, making nearly £40 a year. Even before the war
when the same tobacco cost 8d an ounce, I was spending over £10 a year on it: and if I also
averaged a pint of beer a day, at sixpence, these two items together will have cost me close on
£20 a year. This was probably not much above the national average. In 1938 the people of
this country spent nearly £10 per head per annum on alcohol and tobacco: however, 20 per
cent of the population were children under fifteen and another 40 per cent were women, so
that the average smoker and drinker must have been spending much more than £10. In 1944,
the annual expenditure per head on these items was no less than £23. Allow for the women
and children as before, and £40 is a reasonable individual figure. Forty pounds a year would
just about pay for a packet of Woodbines every day and half a pint of mild six days a week —
not a magnificent allowance. Of course, all prices are now inflated, including the price of
books: still, it looks as though the cost of reading, even if you buy books instead of
borrowing them and take in a fairly large number of periodicals, does not amount to more
than the combined cost of smoking and drinking.
It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets
out of them. “Books” includes novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological
treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if
one habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines,
and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period
of twenty years. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part
of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into
but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and
the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case. But if one regards reading simply
as a recreation, like going to the pictures, then it is possible to make a rough estimate of what
it costs. If you read nothing but novels and “light” literature, and bought every book that you
read, you would be spending-allowing eight shillings as the price of a book, and four hours as
the time spent in reading it-two shillings an hour. This is about what it costs to sit in one of
the more expensive seats in the cinema. If you concentrated on more serious books, and still
bought everything that you read, your expenses would be about the same. The books would
cost more but they would take longer to read. In either case you would still possess the books
after you had read them, and they would be saleable at about a third of their purchase price. If
you bought only second-hand books, your reading expenses would, of course, be much less:
perhaps sixpence an hour would be a fair estimate. And on the other hand if you don't buy
books, but merely borrow them from the lending library, reading costs you round about a
halfpenny an hour: if you borrow them from the public library, it costs you next door to
nothing.
I have said enough to show that reading is one of the cheaper recreations: after listening to
the radio probably THE cheapest. Meanwhile, what is the actual amount that the British
public spends on books? I cannot discover any figures, though no doubt they exist. But I do
know that before the war this country was publishing annually about 15,000 books, which
included reprints and school books. If as many as 10,000 copies of each book were sold —
and even allowing for the school books, this is probably a high estimate-the average person
was only buying, directly or indirectly, about three books a year. These three books taken
together might cost £1, or probably less.
These figures are guesswork, and I should be interested if someone would correct them for
me. But if my estimate is anywhere near right, it is not a proud record for a country which is
nearly 100 per cent literate and where the ordinary man spends more on cigarettes than an
Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood. And if our book consumption remains as low as
it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going
to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are
too expensive.
