Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London s reading public. No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell s novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid.
Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories.
But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the same book twice. He took no notice of titles or author s names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a book whether be had had it already . In a lending library you see people s real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the classical English novelists have dropped out of favour.