Buying secondhand books can sometimes bring unexpected additional pleasures.

Today, the postman brought a copy of Michael Joseph’s The Adventure of Publishing (Allan Wingate, 1949) and, inserted in the front, were two clippings from the Melbourne Herald:

1. A generously long review of the book itself (a propos of Gideon Haigh’s recent complaints about the brevity of today’s book reviews)
2. This little snippet (right) on a 1949 Gallup poll into Australians’ reading habits.

Apart from the amusing anachronisms (‘”white collar” employees and their wives’!), it shows that reading books was a strong part of Australian culture 61 years ago.

This is still so. A 2008 survey conducted by Galaxy Research for the consumer book campaign Books Alive found that

50 percent of Australians read for pleasure in their spare time every day of the week and

Reading books isn’t just for the well-off – 48 percent of those in white collar households read every day of the week, compared to 52 percent in blue collar households.

Given this, one wonders how 7% of Australians have time to be working presently on a novel or short story, as the Australia Council claims they are doing.