About two years ago I moved in around the corner from one of George Orwell’s old abodes in Islington. I know because a blue plaque proudly declares this fact. Orwell is responsible for two important things in my literary life. His masterpiece, 1984, was the first proper novel that I read without a teacher or curriculum forcing me to do so. Everyone remembers their first time right? And also, 1984 was the first and only book that while reading I skipped parts of. One part in fact, that bit where Winston is reading from Goldstein’s ‘The Theory and Practise of Oligarchical Collectivism’ to Julia. I’ve always felt a sense of shame about failing to wholly complete it (even though I class it in my read list). Either that or wondered whether there was perhaps something just plain wrong with me. Anyway, little did I know that this writer, one of the greatest in Britain’s canon, was addicted to the two same basic substances as me.
In 1946 Orwell wrote a now well known essay called Books V. Cigarettes about the arguments that people give to their reasoning behind not indulging in literature. That being that it is too expensive. Orwell goes into detail about his own spending habits and concludes that he himself spends “in the neighbourhood of £25 a year” on books. He goes on to compare this to his other pastime, smoking, on which he spends £40 a year. In the end he implores people to “admit that it is because reading is less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive”.
Orwell died in 1950, at the age of 46, from a burst artery in his lung - his six ounces of tobacco a week no doubt contributed to this untimely demise. Orwell never really got to see the legacy that perhaps his finest work, 1984, brought him (it being published only six months before his death). Now, the Books V. Cigarettes essay is well known and pops up everywhere in the rather pretty Penguin Paperback edition. Despite Orwell’s often pious and arseholish approach to social issues, in Books V. Cigarettes he has struck a chord.
But what about now, in the intervening 60 years, things have moved on. We like to think that we are brighter than the post-war poverty stricken soot covered masses; better fed, in better health and certainly more literate. I am addicted to the two same substances as Orwell, the one that made him and the one that destroyed him – Books and Cigarettes respectively.
Is it still true, are Books still the cheaper pastime? With the various economic pressures effecting leisure activities and the arrival of new ones how does the Book favour.
I don’t smoke quite the same amount as Orwell, in fact I smoke around 10 a day which is 3 ½ packs per week. My brand is £5.11 per pack, so over a year I spend £930.
| £ | 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 |
*Although these were not at direct cost to Orwell, he argued that those books which he had borrowed from others evened out the missing integers left by those he’d had stolen from him.
This was only half of Orwell’s collection, so he doubled the price and divided it by fifteen, the number of years which his collection spanned, and arrived at his £25 a year figure.
First of all, and similar to Orwell, I have two sets of books in different locations. However, they each comprise a similar number and grade as to those readily available for me to count. So here goes:
| No. | |
| Hardbacks Bought | 12 |
| Paperbacks Bought | 128 |
| Hardbacks Bought 2nd Hand | 4 |
| Paperbacks Bought 2nd Hand | 42 |
| Gifted Hardback | 6 |
| Gifted Paperback | 38 |
| Stolen Paperback | 4 |
| Cheap Classics | 24 |
| Total | 258 |
The above numbers account for five years worth of buying. So generally I can calculate the following monetary expenditure based on average prices.
| £ | p. | |
| Hardbacks Bought | 155 | 88 |
| Paperbacks Bought | 894 | 72 |
| Hardbacks Bought 2nd Hand | 40 | |
| Paperbacks Bought 2nd Hand | 126 | |
| Gifted Hardback | 77 | 94 |
| Gifted Paperback | 265 | 62 |
| Stolen Paperback | 27 | 96 |
| Cheap Classics | 60 | |
| Total | 1648 | 12 |
This leaves a total expenditure per year of £235, just shy of ten times that in Orwell’s day – and he had more books. So reading is around about a 4 times cheaper addiction than smoking cigarettes. This compared to Book habit being 60% the cost of smoking in Orwell’s day. The odds have got better for the readers or worst for the smokers; depending on how you look at things.
Orwell also looked at that other great British pastime, drinking. Alcoholism was just as popular in the mid-40’s as it is now. He calculated that a pint of beer a day (at 6d.) cost him £9 2s. 6d. Today, at around £2.10 per pint, you are spending £766.50. So, once again, better for the readers or bad for the boozers.
My cinema ticket today cost £9.70 (then of course there’s the addition of ice cream, but I won’t go into that). The movie was 1 hour 40 minutes which translates to £5.82 for an hours worth of entertainment. Orwell calculated 2 shillings an hour for one of the better seats in a cinema and about the same per hour for a book. I calculate, using the same formula as Orwell, the Book entertainment per hour to be (using £6.99 as the average price for a book) £1.75.
DVD’s are even worse (at around £5 and hour for a cheaper DVD), and don’t get me started on BluRay’s, Xbox’s, Playstation’s etc. etc. PC Games, although perhaps the realm of the weak and nerdy (like me), fair slightly better. It takes perhaps 36 hours to complete Max Payne 2. I bought this game new for £20, so works out at 55p per hour. However, when you start taking into account the cost of the PC, the Operating System to run it and the constant battling with machinery and software – perhaps 55p is conservative and more hassle than it’s worth. Holiday’s are far more expensive, although often work in favour of the readers – especially those like me who tend to pack more books than clothes.
Orwell concluded that reading was the least expensive of the lot and if anything things seemed to have gotten better for the readers in the 60 years or so which have past. Of course, less people smoke now than they did then, but do more people buy books. Is this drop in relative price of reading because demand is so high and supply has met it so easily?
Orwell calculated that on average people bought 3 books per year. Last year, the UK trade market for books was worth £2.3 Billion. If you divide that by the 61 million population (which is bad statistics I know, don’t write in), that’s around £40 per head. Which is what, just shy of six books per annum. This is good, but what are they buying?
With the advent of celebrity has come the Celebrity Biography, and how much of that money was spent on single book ‘crazes’, like Twilight. What about the general state of fiction today compared to Orwell’s. Perhaps we read more now, but I conclude that what we are reading might not be what Orwell expected (or wanted).
I have another conclusion though, which is even more important, that my rather appalling analysis gives me. If I were to give up smoking, I could purchase another 310 second hand books a year, or 133 new ones. And, with the extra years I get by not dying while my hair still retains colour, I might actually get a chance to read them.
No comments:
Post a Comment