"A couple of years ago a friend of mine, a newspaper editor, was firewatching with some factory workers. They fell to talking about his newspaper, which most of them read and approved of, but when he asked them what they thought of the literary section, the answer he got was:  "You don't suppose we read that stuff, do you? Why, half the time you're talking about books that cost twelve and sixpence! Chaps like us couldn't spend twelve and sixpence on a book." These, he said, were men who thought nothing of spending several pounds on a day trip to Blackpool,'' starts essay by George Orwell.

Orwell questions the idea that buying or reading a book is an expensive hobby. He estimates that he have 442 books, acquired in the
following ways:

Now when he, and we, know how many he had books, we need to know how much do they cost. It seems that Orwell took this job seriously. He calculated how much he has paid for every book in fifteen years. Mostly for the prices he sometimes had to base on guesswork, and the costs were as follows:

                                                   £ s. d.
Bought                                     36    9   0
Gifts                                         10 10    0
Review copies, etc                   25 11    9
Borrowed and not returned     4 16    9
On loan                                    3 10    0
Shelves                                    2    0    0
Total                                        82 17    6

442 books for writer seems pretty small amount. What Orwell didn't forget to say, that "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." And one of the things we cant forget about is that Orwell was journalist. ''The biggest will be for newspapers and periodicals, and for this I think £8 a year would be a reasonable figure. Eight pounds a year covers the cost of two daily papers, one evening paper, two Sunday papers, one weekly review and one or two monthly magazines. This brings the figure up to £19 1s.''  Of course, we need to remember that money had different value in that times.

The next thing that Orwell is mentioning is library subscriptions. He estimates that he spends approximately £6 in one year, just for library subscriptions. But the interesting part is yet to come.

"With prices as they now are, I am spending far more on tobacco than I do on books. I smoke six ounces a week, at half-a-crown an ounce, making nearly £40 a year. Even before the war when the same tobacco cost 8d an ounce, I was spending over £10 a year on it: and if I also averaged a pint of beer a day, at sixpence, these two items together will have cost me close on £20 a year. This was probably not much above the national average." Interesting is fact which Orwell explains later "In 1938 the people of this country spent nearly £10 per head per annum on alcohol and tobacco: however, 20 per cent of the population were children under fifteen and another 40 per cent were women, so that the average smoker and drinker must have been spending much more than £10." I have to say that situation in nowadays is different and even money has different value now, but how much average smoker and drinker is spending?

Orwell doesn't stop at alcohol and tobacco. He is also thinking about literature types. Essays, ''light'' literature, poetry, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else. They all have different price and they all can be second-handed, so - the price can be much lower as it could be for new books. So - can we say that books and education is really that expensive? Oh, you need some statistics, graphs? OK, I'll do one for you.

Lets estimate how much one person, who lives in Latvia, spend money on tobacco only. Last year «AC Nielsen» and «TNS Baltic Data House» published information about Latvian smokers. It was estimated that 42.3 percent of Latvians smokes tobacco. In Germany it is 23 percents and in U.S.A. only 19 percents. In year 2008 one Latvian smoked 14 cigarettes per day. That is average.

If one smoker takes 14 cigarettes per day all year, it is 5110 cigarettes in year! In one cigarette packet are 20 cigarettes. 5110 / 20 = 255.5 cigarettes packets per year. And how much we spend on it? If we think that one cigarette packet in Latvia average can cost 1.50 Lats, or in EUR it could be 2.1 EUR (exchange rate today is 0.702804). 255.5 * 2.1 = 563.55 EUR in one year. Only for tobacco!

An average new book in Latvia costs 10 Lats, or 13.99 EUR. Lets see how many books can one Latvian average smoker buy in one year - 563.55 / 13.99 = 38.352 books per one year! And that is only, if this average smoker buys new hard-cover books.

Paper-backs? Lets see it in average - 563.55 / 8.39 = 67.169 books per one year! But the is one problem with paper-backs. Do you want me to tell it for you? There isn't any!

What is about library subscriptions? I don't know what is the situation in other countries, now I am speaking about Latvia. I have subscription in one library. I cost for me half of one Lat, it could be less than 0.7 EUR. Per year? No, per one library card, which I can use forever! (until you lost your previous card, you need to make a new one. Add again 0.7 EUR)

So how it really is - does education and books are that expensive? Orwell has answer for that "I have said enough to show that reading is one of the cheaper recreations: after listening to the radio probably THE cheapest."