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> 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.
In 1946, one pound was ~$4 [0], making 165.15 roughly $660. Using a US dollar inflation calculator [1], $660 in 1946 dollars is $8534 in 2018 dollars. Fudging a little, this works out to about $10 per book.
Later, he estimates his annual reading expense as 25 pounds, which works out to about $1300 annually. That's more than I spend on books+e-books+subscriptions, maybe by about double, but this is George Orwell we're talking about, I'd expect he'd be a better reader than I.
[0] http://www.miketodd.net/encyc/dollhist-graph.htm [1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
To put another spin on it:
In Australia, at $56 for 40 grams of loose tobacco at Coles, the 170 grams or so he smoked would cost ~$240/week in 2018. If you added a pint at the pub per day at city prices that’s another $70/week.
That’s $16000/year and would buy you a lot of books.
(This comparison for amusement purposes only... sin taxes seem to have increased much faster than inflation!).
> sin taxes seem to have increased much faster than inflation
I think that's because back then, everyone smoke & drank, and rather more than we nowadays do, whereas now it's common to look down upon smokers in particular. They're a despised minority, so the ruling class see no problem increasing their taxes. After all, they're free to quite any time they like!
Smokers often overestimate the numbers, and underestimate how much of a minority they are. I read a number of ca. 10% (of adults I guess) for Germany. In some circles it feels like 99% and on average like 50%. Observation bias persists.
> sin taxes
We call them "public health accommodations", now.
Footnote from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman:
"NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and one Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated."
And now five cents is a nickel, two nickels are a dime, five nickels a quarter, four quarters a dollar, a hundred dollars a benjamin, ten benjamins a grand, etc.
Like now, most of that is nicknames and people didn’t use them in combinations. For reference, the actual currency was pounds, shillings and pence. Ratios of 1, 1/20, and 1/12 respectively.
In modern decimal London, 20 pounds is a pony and 100 is a ton. We still have the colorful shorthand.
Yeah US money was on the old "another coin for every doubling". But base-ten doesn't admit to that very well. So we used 1-2-5-10-20-50. We had 1 penny, 2 penny (gone), nickle, dime, quarter(? where is the 20-cent piece?), 50-cent-piece (no name for this?), dollar, two-dollar (gone, then back, then gone again), $10, $20, $50, $100
> 50-cent-piece (no name for this?)
That's a half-dollar
Unrelated to your post is two bits == quarter, if memory serves me it's by way if Spain.
Your memory serves...
Two bits, four bits, six bits a dollar.
Spanish real, pieces of eight. Two bits == two pieces == one quarter.
Anthony Burgess somewhere or other pointed out the superior divisibility of the old English system: 3,2, and 5 as prime factors for the pound, 3, 2, and 7 for the guinea.
I've often thought, base 12 would have made a much better counting system.
As a woodworker, this is one of my prime reasons for still liking inches. Of course, fractional inches are kind of terrible once you get past 16ths, but, that's what decimal inches are for!
(As an aside, one of the great mistakes of standard measurements IMO is that we reduce all our fraction. the alternating 1/2,33/66,17/32,35/64,9/16, etc is awful. We could have just kept everything in 64ths and then just used the numerator.)
> (As an aside, one of the great mistakes of standard measurements IMO is that we reduce all our fraction. the alternating 1/2,33/66,17/32,35/64,9/16, etc is awful. We could have just kept everything in 64ths and then just used the numerator.)
This is what normal people do with metric / decimal.
Everything's in thousands (/1000's) of a metre -- ie. millimetres, or mm.
When you can no longer differentiate the notches on your rule ... you're accurate enough.
I once obtained a ruler that was given in decimal feet. That was a _weird_ day.
At an abstract level -- that is to say, assuming an actual base-12 numbering system -- this may well be the case.
Unfortunately it's a claim often made by people who are preemptively nostalgic for imperial measurements, while simultaneously addicted to base-10 number systems, but who can't quite get past the incompatibilities of the two combined.
Beyond that problem there seems to be an underlying belief that using decimal points, and/or accepting any kind of rounding, is some kind of unforgivable concession.
With the downside of not having enough fingers to use it ;-)
Pence, pounds, and guineas were actually three independent monetary systems: copper, silver, and gold. This reflects other multi-metallic monetary standards, including Rome (Ag, Cu, Au), and China (silver, gold, copper/bronze, and iron, as well as several fiat regimes).
These correspond, roughly, to retail, wholesale, and financial (banking, government) commerce.
It's helpful to recognise that virtualy all names for money refer to either weight (penny, pound, shekel, drachma ...) or some impramateur of quality (royal, crown, mark, dollar, ...). Another set are based on divisions (denarius, dinar, dime, ...).
In the English system, the silver pound was 240 pennyweights, wth subdivisions corresponding;
Farthing: 1/4 penny, 1/960£
Happenny: 1/2 penny, 1/480£
Pence: 1/240£
Tuppence: 1/120£
Thruppence: 1/90£
Sixpence: 1/40£
Shilling (bob): 12d, 1/20£
Florin: 24d, 1/10£
Half crown: 30p, Florin 6d, 1/8£
10 Bob: 120p, 4 Half crowns, 1/2£
The guinea is the odd one out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_currencies
Adam smith discusses English currencyy, at length (of course), and of the maintenance or divergence of values of copper, silver, and gold.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
Nice write up. I remember the day the money was replaced, my business was in the sweet shop next to my primary school. I liked the new coins because they were all clean and shiny. I'm sure we were ripped off when it came to penny bars.
So odd to get this window into a different time.
“The economics of content” were very much a topic back then!
Aside:
“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.”
Folks read a lot of newspapers back then!
> Folks read a lot of newspapers back then!
Well, there was no internet back then.
It wouldn't surprise me of we are actually consuming more (written) content in 2018 then we did in 1946.
I am certain that we are reading more. The quality of that content has fell sharply imho, tho.
As we are littered by content via our always-on lifestyles, we tend only to skim and read shallow stuff, or stuff that's gonna help us get by our current hurdles. That odd quick read on StackOverflow counts as that too.
Sitting down and actually grasping a full book is becoming a rare skill, because of this imposed-adhd lifestyle of ever-greater everything.
> Sitting down and actually grasping a full book is becoming a rare skill
Nope. People are more literate today than 70 years ago. People are better educated today and have more schooling. On average, more people have read a full book than before.
Strange to think that people are nostalgic for an era were women ( half the population ) were discouraged from going to college and minorities were denied equal access to education. Even stranger that people think that people were better educated then.
It's statistically impossible for your version of the past to be true.
And yet, we’re seeing literacy rates drop as the first generation of “always had smartphones” kids exit high school.
Our mobile phone literary is more akin to oral language in form and complexity than long form literature or technical writing.
People are better educated today and have more schooling
Proof by insistence? When you see the written reports the kids produce at my university you can only disagree violently. Two or three years in, and they still have no command of their own native language. If they read books or the daily paper you'd expect them to pick up proper usage by osmosis, but no, not here, not at this regional 4-year college.
People get confused when they read or watch movies or books from the time, because the majority of them focus on the 1% of the intellectual elite. Nowadays there is a lot less of a barrier to entry for writing and publishing written articles and literature so you see a lot more dumb books now than before, but that is just because demand was less and quality control was more strict.
An NYRB Classics series paperback costs about $20. That is right around the price of two of glasses of of one of the least expensive wines at the nearest bar to my office.
"These figures are guesswork, and I should be interested if someone would correct them for me."
Interesting to see that the standards of internet journalism are not entirely new...
"Given to me or bought with book tokens"
Book tokens?! Is this some kind of 40s cryptocurrency?
Seems like an early kind of gift certificate scheme. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2007/nov/17/weekend...
We still have book tokens here (Ireland). They're a gift voucher that's only redeemable for books, and not tied to a specific shop
They were/are much prized as an 'improving' birthday present or prize for children.
What does "twelve and sixpence" mean? Is it 12 pence plus 6 pence? Is it 12 shillings and 6 pence (so 12x12 + 6 = 150 pence)?
The article would be more enjoyable if converted to decimal currency and adjusted for inflation.
Second is correct. 20 shillings in the pound so 12 and sixpence is 5/8 of a pound
This article made me wonder: if you had 900 books, how would you ever be able to reference anything in those books?
For example, today, I might think "Let me look up that quote in one of the books in my Kindle app. I know I highlighted it so I can just search those."
Back then, did people have their own mini card catalogs or notebooks with quote-book-page data?
I guess it depends on the person, but my grandfather's flat used to be filled worth annotated books with little bits of paper bookmarks going out. I guess one would find a way. You could also make an index notepad listing quotes accompanied by the book name and page number.
I thought this was going to relate to the printing of cigarette ads inside of books, and immediately thought of Harlan Ellison’s “dead gophers” interview ...
As a Yank, I don't think I'll ever fully understand British financial nomenclature. Bobs, Shillings, et. al.
“NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
Two Farthings = One Ha’penny. Two ha’pennies = One Penny. Three Pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalised currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.”
-- Good Omens, Pratchett & Gaiman
The interesting part to me is that currency is indivisible past a certain point, so it actually makes sense to have something with more factors! Compare to distance or mass units, for example, where the sub-units are irrelevant. No problem having a distance of 1/7 foot, say, even though a foot has 12 inches in it. £(1/7), on the other hand, is impossible.
Since the divisibility argument is often trotted in defence of continued use of non-metric measurement systems, it seems odd it's more rarely used to defend non-decimal currencies, where it might actually be useful. Though the fact nobody uses meaningfully-non-decimal currencies any more is some evidence for arguing that this just isn't as useful as the convenience of the easy decimal numbers.
Still, however many currency sub-units you have, inflation makes the issue less pressing over time.
I mean, I don't think most current British citizens understand that nomenclature. It's just not in use anymore.
Now it's pounds and pence which work very much like dollars and cents. 100 pennies to the pound.
The biggest difference now is probably that Americans have cents, nickels, dimes, and quarters, where the British have pennies, two-pennies / two p (sometimes, but rarely these days, called tuppence), five p, ten p, twenty p, and fifty p.
To me that's easier to keep track of than remembering which one's the nickel and which is the dime.
These are all to do with the pre-decimal currency, which was replaced in 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd
The only term still in general use seems to be 'quid'.
UK currency was decimalised in 1971. Before that it was 12 pence per shilling, 20 shillings per pound. Not ideal to work with (there's a reason they switched), but still pretty straightforward.
As a Brit, I don't understand Bob and Shillings either, probably because we don't use them anymore.
Do you think feet, yards and inches are any easier? ;)
Don't worry, most Brits don't either.