Every year, the release of figures detailing the number of books borrowed from the United Kingdom’s public libraries provides a fascinating snapshot of the nation’s reading habits. Established by an act of parliament in 1979 and now administered by the British Library, Public Lending Right ensures that all authors who register for it are paid 7.82p for each loan of one of their books, up to a threshold of £6,600 – and serves, coincidentally, as a statistician’s goldmine. Anyone who fancies becoming a bestselling author, and wants to know the surest way to the reading public’s heart, could do very much worse than to study the PLR figures.
The obvious lesson to be drawn from them is that thrillers are the genre likeliest to dominate a library’s check-out desk. Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train was the single most borrowed title across the UK. Close behind in both second and third spots was Lee Child, with Personal and Make Me respectively. The single most borrowed author of all – as he has been for the last decade – was the US thriller writer James Patterson. His books were borrowed 2m times last year, and over the last 10 years have clocked up a staggering 20m loans.
Writing a bestselling thriller, though, is not the only way to become a PLR juggernaut. Encouragingly for those who worry about the future of public libraries, four of the top 10 most borrowed titles in 2015-16 were children’s books: three instalments of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series clocked in at four, five and eight respectively, with David Walliams’ Awful Auntie coming in at nine. Even more impressively, seven of the 10 most borrowed authors write for children – and one of them, Roald Dahl, managed it despite being dead. Julia Donaldson, Daisy Meadows, Roderick Hunt and Francesca Simon occupied four of the top five spots. Only the behemoth that is Patterson continues to defy the onward march of the children’s author.
Dahl is not the only dead writer to feature prominently in the PLR tables. Harper Lee’s sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman, was the seventh most borrowed book from UK libraries over the last year, and Lee herself features as the fifth most borrowed classic author. Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie and Beatrix Potter also remain hugely popular with the British library-visiting public, and Charles Dickens, were he still alive, would easily have earned the maximum PLR pay out of £6,600. Form, it seems, is temporary, but class is permanent.
Non-fiction, as it ever does in the PLR borrowing tables, featured much less prominently than fiction in 2015-16 – and those non-fiction authors who would like to boost their profile in public libraries are strongly recommended to take up cooking. The most borrowed non-fiction author, coming in at 193, was Mary Berry; the most borrowed cookery book overall was by Jamie Oliver. Paul O’Grady had the most borrowed biography with Open the Cage, Murphy!; Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling was the most borrowed travel book, and the second most borrowed non-fiction title overall, behind only Guinness World Records 2015; Antony Beevor, with Ardennes 1944, had the most borrowed history book in 2015-16.
Further fascinating details are provided by the regional borrowing figures. The popularity of Guinness World Records was particularly salient in – where else? – Northern Ireland, where it beat the otherwise unstoppable Julia Donaldson, David Walliams and Paula Hawkins to the title of most borrowed library book. Scotland delivered the crown to The Girl on the Train; Wales to Lee Child’s Make Me; London – disappointingly, perhaps, for the city that boasts the Globe theatre, the British Library and Charing Cross Road – to The Official DSA Theory Test for Car Drivers.
At a time when cuts to the UK’s library service have generated much pessimism about its prospects, the release of the PLR figures serves as a reminder of the tremendous service it continues to provide across the country, and how highly treasured it is by the public. Authors, too, have good reason to be grateful for it: not just for the role it plays in fostering the reading habit, but because PLR constitutes a statement on behalf of the entire country on the value that it places on writing. Governments of all persuasions have reliably supported it; and particular thanks this year should go to Ed Vaizey – culture minister until his recent defenestration by Theresa May – who was always a steadfast and generous friend of Public Lending Right.
PLR remains today what it has been for the last 37 years: an index of Britain’s status as a civilised society.
• Tom Holland is a writer and historian and chair of the Public Lending Right Advisory Committee.
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