A love of books has been central to Good Housekeeping’s ethos since we launched in 1922. Here, books editor Joanne Finney celebrates the page-turners of the past century and considers what we’re likely to be reading in the future
In aworld where there’s fierce competition for our time, books remain hugely popular. In a recent YouGov survey, nearly half the population (43%) said they read at least once a week for pleasure and last year alone saw 212m print books fly off the shelves*.
So, what is the reason for this ongoing love affair? ‘Storytelling is always going to be a fundamental part of our culture,’ says Bea Carvalho, head of fiction at Waterstones. ‘Books are one of the oldest forms of entertainment and the joy of the physical book shouldn’t be underestimated. They are beautiful objects.’
The current success is surprising, given that a decade ago the market was in decline. At the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2011, author Ewan Morrison asked: “are books dead?” He predicted that, within 25 years, paper books would not exist, thanks to e-books. And not only would digital replace print, the work of authors as we know them would become of little value.
Obviously Morrison wasn’t able to foresee the pandemic that kept us inside and turning to books, but even before that, print books were showing signs of new growth. Although e-book sales overtook print in 2012, by 2016 e-book sales were falling, while print grew by 7%. Last year – even with bookshops shut for the first few months – print book sales rose by 5% and were neck-and-neck with e-books in terms of income (£3.5b for print and £3.2b digital*).
A LOVE OF BOOKS
Good Housekeeping has recognised and fed its readers’ love of books since the beginning, with a mix of short stories, author interviews and book reviews in every issue (our very first issue opened with a short story by William J Locke, which ran before even the editor’s letter). Over the past 100 years, household names have written for our pages, from Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier to Joanne Harris and Alexander McCall Smith.
When Good Housekeeping launched, readers would most likely have borrowed rather than bought their books. ‘Circulating libraries, which members paid a small fee to belong to, were very popular with the middle classes in the early 20th century,’ says Dr Nicola Wilson, associate professor in book and publishing studies at University of Reading. ‘In the 1920s, few ordinary people would have bought books, as they were so expensive and there were few bookshops outside of London. These libraries, found in shops like Boots and WH Smith, were seen as smart and exclusive.’
212 m PRINT BOOKS WERE SOLD IN 2021 IN THE UK
Book clubs, such as The Book Society, which launched in the 1920s as a mail-order subscription service, were also becom
