Shelf after shelf of unread books 

From The BBC

6 March 2014

A survey to mark World Book Day has found that the majority of books found in British houses have not been read - but is that really surprising, asks Ben Milne.

The average British household has 138 volumes on its shelves, less than half of which have been read, according to research by storage company Shurgard. "It is a kind of peacock-feather display," says the writer and critic John Sutherland. He thinks that the proportion of unread books will depend upon their location in the house - "Living rooms are display windows." Sutherland says he suspects the volumes in the lavatory are more likely to have been read, as are those on the bedroom shelves. It would be a slightly scary household where every single book had been read. That said, there's arguably something suspicious about someone who hasn't read any of the books on their shelves. Those prominently displayed volumes of Karl Ove Knausgard or Margaret Attwood may make you look like a heavyweight intellectual, but inevitably there is going to come a point when a visitor looks at their unbroken spines and asks: "Just how many of these have you actually read?" On the other hand, one could adopt the defiant stance of Lord Redesdale, father of the famous Mitford sisters, who claimed to have only ever read one book in his life - White Fang by Jack London. "He enjoyed [it] so much, he vowed never to read another one," Deborah Mitford once recalled.

So, there's a balance to be achieved. "A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing," writes Susan Hill in Howard's End Is On The Landing, her memoir of trying to read all the books in her house, "but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with potential to burst into new life." And emotional attachment is one of the main reasons people give the survey for not throwing out books - they're "particles of ourselves", says Sutherland. If nothing else, they're decorative. In the words of a title by the novelist Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish A Room. Perhaps you own a copy. Maybe you've even read it.

[I suppose that after learning that the average Brit reads 3 books a year the fact that the average household has 138 books on its shelves is moderately impressive. Of course, as I average about 70 books a year at the moment (with more in my youth) you would imagine that I have rather more than 138 books piled up on various bookcases. Indeed a quick ‘head’ count reveals around 100 books per shelf – 50 in front and another 50 tucked in behind. My total is probably in the region of 4-5,000 give or take a few hundred. Of these I’m probably running at around 1,000 – 1,500 unread. Not because they are on ostentatious display (for who exactly) but because I haven’t got around to them yet or, quite possibly, my interest has moved on from that particular topic/genre and I’m waiting to circle back to it at some point in the future. Book wise I always expect myself to be ranked in the top 5% of readers – with the probable exception of classic reading. Of course the frightening thing to consider is that if the average is 138 and I have 5,000 and I’m far from unique then there are a considerable number of homes with few or no books in them at all…. Now that’s scary stuff!]