Coincidentally, a few days after I wrote my post comparing British and American book covers last month, I went home to Britain for the holidays — and was struck by another subtle but (to me, anyway) interesting difference between the publishing industry in the two countries: reading in Britain is a lot more “lowbrow” than reading in America.

That might sound a bit topsy-turvy given the usual over-rehearsed stereotypes about each country — wherein Americans in general prefer TV to books and are deeply suspicious of anything purportedly intellectual, and the Brits, on the other hand, are highbrow snobs who can’t bear the vulgarity American pop culture — but I think precisely because of those stereotypes being at least partly correct at least part of the time, the publishing industry in each country takes on the opposite sort of character.

Let me try and explain: I’ve grown used to “mainstream” bookstores in America (as opposed to university bookstores) having pretty much any book I want; that is, although I usually don’t go into Porter Square Books or Brookline Booksmith or even (gasp) Borders and Barnes & Noble for anything more than novels and popular nonfiction, I can still be sure of finding a decent selection of new and classic “intellectual” books, too. Sure, maybe a particularly obscure title will require a trip to the internet, but in general if I want to pick up a copy of Richard Lanham’s rhetorical analysis or Gertrude-sodding-Stein’s modernist dreck — i.e. a book of interest mainly to academics — I can, fairly easily.

Last month in Britain, though, I traipsed through all the major mainstream booksellers in Edinburgh and couldn’t find a single copy of Lanham anywhere (I didn’t check for Gertrude-sodding-Stein). Indeed, I couldn’t find much of anything except “popular literature”: realist novels, a small shelf of the classics, and then the usual assortment of genre, humor, coffee table books, current biographies, popular science, etc. Mainstream British bookstores, in short, don’t really cater to academics or the extremely highbrow — those sorts of things are restricted much more to “specialist” bookstores around universities.

And I think that actually makes rather a lot of sense (again with the acknowledgement that the stereotypes are only partly accurate): in Britain, the “intellectually snooty” country in which a relatively larger proportion of the population buys books (including, most importantly, the lower social classes), bookstores cater mostly to the mainstream; in America, the “vulgar pop culture” country where book buyers tend to be further up the socio-economic scale (and, by association, tend to have at least some higher education), bookstores logically serve that more highbrow market. (One caveat: the U.S. market is actually split between trade/genre buyers and these mythical highbrow buyers I hypothesize, but that doesn’t diminish the latter’s influence on bookstores’ heterogeneity.)

So, take home message? American bookstores are in some respects much better than British ones, even though the British public in general consists of more enthusiastic readers. (And, if you’re a writer of literary fiction, make sure you get a good deal on foreign rights: only 1% of the market in the U.S. is literary/classic fiction, compared to 13% in Britain, which still works out to more moolah even taking into account the fact that the U.S. market is ten times bigger.)

(All data courtesy Gallagher, Kerry and Steve Bohme. “A Special Relationship? A Comparison of Consumer Book Buying Habits and Trends in the United States and Great Britain.” Publishing Research Quarterly 25(4):246-253. 2009. All sweeping generalizations courtesy the author.)

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