"... Not more than five or six, sir—or—or a dozen at the most, sir."
I could be like Billy Bunter and his biscuits and try to claim that apart from the piles of books looking reproachfully at me while they wait to be read, I have a negligible few on my wishlist with a view to future acquisition; the current tally there is actually 'four'. Four hundred, that is. And eighty seven. In mitigation, some of that number are destined for other people as gifts, and the remainder fall into all sorts of categories - cooking, knitting and the rest - so they are not all 'reading books', but ... no, I'm not even convincing myself! I'm incorrigible, I suspect, though I know I'm not alone in this, and if you are similarly possessed/obsessed you might care to own up in solidarity.
Books gradually trickle down here, making their way slowly from the wishlist to the Cornflower shelves, but on the subject of actual book-buying - rather than planning to buy - this survey claims that only 57% of Britons bought one or more books in the year in question, and in the US the figure was 50% - though that's not to say that many others didn't borrow from libraries, or read from their already extensive collections (see above).
To go back to my covetous/acquisitive tendency, maybe this is largely a female trait, as book-buying in both countries is dominated by women, apparently, and this survey for 2007 shows the significance of the romantic novel to the market as a whole, with romance readers (who are mostly women) buying and borrowing more than consumers of adult fiction in general. Love and the ladies make the book world go round, it seems!
