> 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.
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.
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
You are right. "pieces of eight" seems to come from the phrase pieces of eight reals, with the real being the Spanish unit of silver money. Although I would guess and this site states that they did get cut up from time to time to make change[1].
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.
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.
When I'm working with a chainsaw I'm 'accurate' to within several millimetres.
Through a tablesaw or bandsaw etc I'm closer to 1-2 millimetres accuracy.
It's rare I need to get to thickenesser levels of accuracy (0.5 millimetres, say) ... but I usually work with more forgiving softer timbers.
A friend of mine does some seriously precise metalwork - down to 'thousands of an inch' (he's English, but has lived in AU for some decades). It's beyond my realm, though the level of accuracy transcends measurement systems -- whether it's thousands of inches, or extra zeroes after the dot for fractions of a mm -- it's a matter of tooling, or, as I say, gradations on your rule!
Yeah, consistency is really the important one. Almost none of my projects in wood are built "to spec". So, as long as the thickness is consistent between boards, the table will be flat, the joinery will match, etc.
Conversely, in metal, pretty much 100% of my projects are built to a plan, since they tend to be parts of machinery/tools/jigs that need to be the reference surfaces. Oh, the money i've spent on measuring equipment. yeesh.
I bought a 3-pack of tape measures at Home Depot several years ago, being delighted that they were much cheaper than normal.
Sure enough, first time I go to use one I discover it's in decimal feet. That, too, was a weird day. I'm in Canada, so it's not unusual for some things to be in feet/inches and some to be in meters/centimeters/etc. But my brain positively melted when it couldn't reconcile the incongruity of those tape measures.
I actually make and sell these, as well as rulers that are in decimal inches. They're handy for woodworkers or others that need to use multiple scales.
Even weirder, I've made rulers that indicate pixels at the precise PPI density for MacBook pros, iPhones, etc, so that my graphic designer friend could hand sketch UI/UX elements to scale and see how they'd render.
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.
You can count from zero to twelve one the knuckles of each finger, using your thumb as an index. Easy-peasy. Combined, that means you can get from 0 to 156 (12*12 + 12). Much better than the 10 one can manage simply by holding up fingers.
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;
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.
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.
We're seeing test scores drop. I'd reserve all other judgement.
There are tons of other dubious and dire socioeconomic "firsts" for this generation that would affect such scores. Sugar packed, nutritionally light, chemically flavored foodstuffs. Totally-Not-poverty. 60 hour work weeks across multiple jobs...
Add to it changes in what schools teach and what tests measure. Changes in who is included in those tests against 70 years before (was 16 years old drop out tested 70 years ago? pregnant teenager?).
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.
Proof by statistics and facts. Hardly any women went to college back then. So that's about 50% of the population who were less educated. Thrown in minorities who were discouraged from getting an education, it's statistical fact.
Perhaps if you bothered to read my comment rather than jumping to complain about your students...
"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."
> When you see the written reports the kids produce at my university you can only disagree violently.
Sure, the overall quality of the student body is lower because far more people attend college. But overall, the education level is higher collectively.
Also, instead of blaming technology, have you considered the quality of educators have declined markedly?
I'm not sure that one does pick up proper usage by osmosis. To me it seems that most of us require somebody to tell one that the writing isn't that good and requires more work, whether that someone is parent, teacher, or boss.
My brother, who teaches a college class or two as an adjunct, complains of undergraduate writing. On the other hand, I can say that I was a copy editor long ago, and there were many Ph.D.s back then who couldn't write a clear paragraph.
Sounds like a case of "elite bias" that crops up in history naturally. Previously mostly the far end of the bell curve would be the only ones you tended to hear about because they were the ones writing stuff down in detail. Roman graffiti while insightful doesn't tell you much more than humanity doesn't change much when it is just some guy boasting about his sexual conquests or insulting his neighbor. Not good for telling you who is in charge or how good a job they did.
The noneducated got largely forgotten because they left little trace. Go to a retirement home and ask about what they did for a living and how much education they had - you will find a very high percentage without even a high school diploma - and that is the recent enough that they are still alive past.
Look at the internet - when it was just universities everyone was more technically knowledgeable but now that it is widespread and accessible there is a broader range. That doesn't mean that technical adeptness is going down.
You see the Miners Institutes in South Wales and the Workingmens Institutes in Yorkshire - and the people who founded those were in school until they turned 16 and then went to work for their coal mine or cotton mill. No university required.
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.
Also, there was plenty of junk printed - "dime novels" or tabloids. Nobody assigns those books in school anymore, so people tend to assume that everything written in past was classic.
And also, past tended to have heavy censorship so sex and such were less in picture.
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.
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 ...
“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.”
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.
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.
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/