Public lending right: Richard and Judy skew results? (part of import week)

I was very happy to see that Janet and Allan Ahlberg are still in the top ten borrowed books from public libraries in the UK. For those of you not in the know, the Public Lending Right provides a small payment to authors each time their book is borrowed, 6p per loan up to a maximum of around £6.5K I think.

The lending stats for last year saw the top three positions going to the same authors as last year: James Patterson, Jaqueline Wilson and Daisy Meadows; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was the most borrowed individual item. I always find it heartening to see so many childrens authors in the top 10, I think it counters the usual news stories of obese children whose fingers are too fat to play their PS3s.

Here are the charts in full:

http://www.plr.uk.com/mediaCentre/mostBorrowedAuthors/mostBorrowedAuthors.htm

The Indy has an interesting article on the value of cooperative writing/ fiction factory farming:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/the-author-of-choice-for-britains-library-borrowers-779792.html

The article of the day for me has to be about Richard and Judy's Book Club recommendations. It seems the good folk of the South are lapping up their chioces, whereas the Northerners content themselves with hot romance and gripping crime yarns. Any article in which Stuart Maconie describes the nation's favourite/ most loathed sofa-sitting couple as "the greatest arbiters of literary taste since F. R. Leavis", is certainly worth a read.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5671940.ece

I used to have Latin seminars in the old kitchens of the original English Faculty building in Cambridge. There used to be a rumour that every creak, rumble, and bump was the ghost of F. R. Leavis turning in his grave about how underappreciated he had been, and, no doubt, how critically unaware the current batch of undergraduates were. If he reads the Times then I expect the English Faculty will be a-creakin' and a-groanin' all morning with the power of this unfortunate uneven juxtaposition. Who needs Richard and Judy when you could have Frank and Queenie, now there's daytime TV I would pay to see.