Bibliophilia

Today is excellent, because I get to talk about books. I like books a lot. I don't go out, I stay in and read books. (This is honestly true. When other parents were berating their teenaged children for going out late and getting drunk underage, mine were berating me for staying up reading too late on a school night...) I read fiction - I have a soft spot for young adult fantasy (who honestly doesn't love Harry Potter?), but I also enjoy serious adult stuff from any genre, but particularly sci-fi and fantasy. When I'm feeling the need to become less bitter, I read romance novels (though I'm yet to find a good Mills & Boone). I'm also a big fan non-fiction - most of my bookshelf is taken up by history books (obviously...) though I enjoy well written science books too, and even once read a maths book. (Slash it was a book on fractals so I basically just looked at the pictures but they were really pretty and in a vaguely trippy kind of way. And when I say 'vaguely trippy', I basically mean 'what I imagine you might experience should you take some drugs because I am far too busy reading to partake in such activities'...)

Speaking of drugs, have you ever just inhaled a book? I honestly can't work out what smells best - a brand new book in all it's freshness, or an old book from a charity shop, with that very specific musty smell...

Anyway. BOOKS.

Today in 1768, the first Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published, in Edinburgh. This was such a mammoth task that it wasn't completed until 1771, and when the second edition was published, in 1797 (and completed in 1801), it ran to more than 20 volumes. As you probably know, it's still going today, and even though it is now published in the United States, it maintains it's British English spelling. Which leads me on nicely onto something I'm proud of Britain for doing.

I'm British/English but I don't really identify with that label. I'm not patriotic - I don't support my country in sports or sing God Save the Queen at every opportunity or do anything typically British or English really, except drink lots of tea. I think that's partially because I find the whole "What-ho old chap, aren't we Brits really quite something, eh? Jolly good show we put on against those dastardly Aussies in the cricket this weekend, and what!" thing very Conservative, which as a socialist I am (of course) very much against, but also, historically, we did so much wrong to the world that I just feel embarrassed and ashamed to even think about celebrating it. Everyone knows about how 'the sun never sets on the British Empire!', but frankly it's embarrassing that this is still presented to young school children as a Good Thing. The fact that our subjugation of many, many other nations is presented as an achievement just disgusts me, so I therefore refuse to be patriotic.

With the exception of one thing. As a country, we should celebrate at every opportunity we have just how great our literature is. Now, this is quite a hard thing to prove, you might say. Every country in the world likes to claim that they have (or had) the "world's greatest author" - the English might claim Shakespeare, the French Hugo, the Americans Twain, and because obviously everyone has a different opinion on what the 'best' type of literature is, it is impossible to say which out of those three alone is the greatest author. However, one way of measuring just how good an author is, is to measure their total book sales.

Now, this is obviously fairly imprecise, but we are looking for a general number of sales, rather than exact figures. Part of what makes an author 'great' is word of mouth - when all of your friends start saying "Hey, have you read ABC? It's really good!" you are more inclined to check out a book than if they'd gone "Urgh, don't read ABC, it's really rubbish and I couldn't even be bothered to finish it!". Anyway, in 1979, UNESCO decided to publish a list of the top 50 authors in the world at the time, based on total book sales alone.

The decisions they made regarding who to include on the list are somewhat perplexing. The original list included authors who weren't really authors (Walt Disney Inc. and the Bible, for example); the same authors twice (sort of - they included each of the Grimm brothers separately, for some bizarre reason) and people whose books were printed more for supply than demanded (Lenin, Marx, the Pope and so on). Once you take out these non-entries though, you're left with a list of 41 authors - of which 14 are British. 
 

They are, with their world ranking based on how may books they've sold in brackets: Agatha Christie (1), Enid Blyton (3), William Shakespeare (4), Barbara Cartland (5), Arthur Conan Doyal (14), Robert Louis Stevenson (19), Charles Dickens (20), Victoria Holt (23), Oscar Wilde (25), Alistair MacLean (27), James Hadley Chase (32), JRR Tolkien (34), Ruth Rendell (35) and Rudyard Kipling (40). 

In comparison, the United States has a mere 11 authors on the list (their best-selling author being Danielle Steele, coming in at number six), leaving the rest of the world to make up the remaining 16 authors. Now, as this list is clearly based on popularity, I am sure that if it were to be repeated today, the order would have changed slightly - and I would bet all £3.82 of my life-savings that both JK Rowling and Stephenie Mayer would appear on the list as well.

Also, I would hope that, if it were to be repeated today, African and Asian authors would be better represented on the list, as it is admittedly very Western-centric. However, for all we should (rightly) decry the exclusion of these countries from the list, it seems odd that, say, France isn't as well represented on the list as Britain is. (The list counts all copies of a book, no matter what language it's in, so the argument that a book isn't on there because it only counts books published in English, which obviously Britain would have a monopoly on, is rendered null and void). None of the other major European countries - which have a very, very similar history generically to Britain, are nearly as well represented on the list.

From this, we can only conclude that our great strength as a nation is novel writing, something I am more than happy to be proud of and patriotic about. That is what a real achievement is, not however many foreign countries we once ruled over.